The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball (2008)

Author: Nicholas Dawidoff 
Title: The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball
Pub Date: 2008
Genre: Memoir

Dawidoff recounts his unhappy 1970s childhood in New Haven, Connecticut and New York City in this memoir.  Dawidoff's parents split when he was young, and he and his younger sister were raised primarily by his schoolteacher mother, a woman of firm opinions and a rigid frugality in New Haven.  However, his father never quite disappears from Dawidoff's life; young Nicky often spends the weekend with his increasingly troubled father at the latter's Manhattan apartment.  A onetime rising lawyer, Dawidoff's father descends further and further into mental illness, becoming more unstable and unpleasant as his children age, shouting obscenities on phone calls and at family gatherings.

The author, scrawny, shy, and a frequent target of bullies, takes refuge from his family life on sandlot and high school baseball fields, and in listening to his beloved Boston Red Sox play (his mother never allowed a television into the house). The ballplayers he idolizes in person at the ballpark, on the radio, and ithiose he encounters in the pages of the numerous baseball books he devours, present to Dawidoff male role models of a kind he cannot find in his own life.  For Nicky, baseball is more than a game, it is a transporter to a better reality.

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