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    Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life: The Heros Life
    Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life: The Heros Life
    Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life: The Heros Life
    Audiobook (abridged)6 hours

    Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life: The Heros Life

    Written by Richard Ben Cramer

    Narrated by Richard Ben Cramer

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    In the hard-knuckled thirties, Joe DiMaggio was the immigrant boy who made it big. He was the dominant star in the New York Yankees dynasty. As World War II loomed, Joltin' Joe launched a fifty-six game hitting streak -- and the nation literally sang his name. In the age of postwar ease and plenty, he became Broadway Joe, the icon of elegance and class -- marrying Marilyn Monroe, the most beautiful girl in America.
    In 1962, when he lost that girl for good, Joe was everyman embarking on a decade of national bereavement. Joe DiMaggio was a mirror of our best self, but he was also the loneliest hero we ever had. A nation of fans would give him anything, but what he wanted most was to hide the life he chose.
    In this groundbreaking biography, Richard Ben Cramer presents a stunning, often shocking portrait of the hero nobody knew. It is a story that sweeps through the twentieth century, bringing to light America's national game, movie stars, mobsters, as well as the birth -- and the price -- of modern national celebrity.
    This is the story Joe DiMaggio never wanted to tell. It is the story of his grace and greed, his dignity, pride and his hidden shame.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateOct 1, 2000
    ISBN9780743519038
    Author

    Richard Ben Cramer

    Richard Ben Cramer (1950-2013) won the Pulitzer Prize for Middle East reporting in 1979. His journalism has appeared in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and Rolling Stone. He is the author of How Israel Lost: The Four Questions and the classic of modern American politics What It Takes: The Way to the White House.

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    Reviews for Joe DiMaggio

    3.5/5

    77 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      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 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)
    • 4/5
      Reviews by Ron Kaplan appear in January Magazine, Elysian Fields Quarterly and Bookreporter.com