Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Simon & Schuster (2000), Edition: First Edition, 546 pages
Description
This is the life story of Joe DiMaggio, including his first game with the New York Yankees in the 1930s, his marriage to Marilyn Monroe & his rise to hero status. Richard Ben Cramer tells of the ways in which fame can both build & destroy.
Media reviews
So in ''Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life,'' Cramer is faced with the daunting task of reading the mind of a man totally unlike himself or any of us, and he decides to wade right in, starting his book with a bravura feat of ESP in re DiMaggio's last, dying appearance at Yankee Stadium in 1998, which,
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it turns out, was chiefly about ''money, mostly money, as it mostly was with Joe. . . . The fact was, DiMaggio was never wistful. (At that moment, he was furious.) And he never spent an instant in his life to marvel at the beauty of anything. Except maybe a broad.'' The fact was? Never? Obviously, clairvoyance is not going to be a problem for this author. But there's also a twin problem of seeing Joe's world exactly as he saw it, and this may be even tougher, because it requires leaping over several generation gaps and landing on one's feet. Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member RonKaplanNJ
Reviews by Ron Kaplan appear in January Magazine, Elysian Fields Quarterly and Bookreporter.com
LibraryThing member ehines
I am of two minds about this book. It is definitely readable and informative about the contexts in which DiMaggio lived. But, there are some real problems with the new-journalistic liberties Cramer takes. For instance, again and again throughout the book we get interior passages from DiMaggio, who
From Cramer's imagination largely. And that's an imagination that is very, very hostile to Joe DiMaggio. Who on balance *does* seem like a very strange cat. But we seldom get very much insight into him except in the Marilyn Monroe section where Cramer does have indirect access to the thoughts of a DiMaggio intimate (Monroe).
Cramer manages to remind us how interesting the social phenomenon called DiMaggio was. He gets some good answers as to what the DiMaggio myth meant to us. He gets very few as to who the man really was. This far, he has done well given the circumstances. To the extent he pretends to more than this, he really loses credit as a journalist and a biographer.
I highly recommend WIlfrid Sheed's NYT review (linked to on this page)
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didn't cooperate with Cramer. In fact he was actively hostile, urging his close associates to not speak with Cramer either. So where does this interiority come from?From Cramer's imagination largely. And that's an imagination that is very, very hostile to Joe DiMaggio. Who on balance *does* seem like a very strange cat. But we seldom get very much insight into him except in the Marilyn Monroe section where Cramer does have indirect access to the thoughts of a DiMaggio intimate (Monroe).
Cramer manages to remind us how interesting the social phenomenon called DiMaggio was. He gets some good answers as to what the DiMaggio myth meant to us. He gets very few as to who the man really was. This far, he has done well given the circumstances. To the extent he pretends to more than this, he really loses credit as a journalist and a biographer.
I highly recommend WIlfrid Sheed's NYT review (linked to on this page)
Show Less
Awards
Seymour Medal (Finalist — 2001)
CASEY Award (Finalist — 2000)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
2000
Physical description
546 p.; 6.75 inches
ISBN
0684853914 / 9780684853918
Other editions
Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life by Richard Ben Cramer (Paper Book)
Joe DiMaggio : The Hero's Life by Richard Ben Cramer (Paper Book)
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