In a stunning feat of meticulous reportage, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ben Cramer ultimately puts to rest the "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" question with iconoclastic bravura. In Cramer's evaluation, the hero America held onto so desperately for so long was really a creation of a nation's communal imagination. The Joe DiMaggio that America tried so hard to believe in was never really here at all.

There was, of course, a Joe DiMaggio, and he had a splendid career in Yankee pinstripes--once hitting safely in an unimaginable 56 consecutive games--and a troubled marriage with Marilyn Monroe, each augmenting the other in our national mythology. But myths tend to be skin-deep, and Cramer's biography thrives in an internal geography well below the surface. The map he charts is of a cold, small, often nasty, uncaring, resentful, self-centered man, a man of public grace and private misery who broke friendships, shunned family, and chased money with the same focused energies he once harnessed to run down fly balls. It's not a pretty picture.

Scrupulously researched and elegantly written, The Hero's Life is filled with stories and reminiscences, both on and off the field, from others--not surprisingly, DiMaggio offered no cooperation--that both illumine the man and, more fascinatingly, explain our very need for him. Amid all the success and adulation, there was little joy in DiMaggio's life, and few moments--beyond the real heartache he felt over Monroe--of connection with others beyond Joe's personal need for others to serve him. "No one really knew what it meant to have spent a half-century being precisely and distinctly DiMaggio," Cramer writes, "what we required Joe DiMaggio to be. No one knew, as he did, what it cost to live the hero's life. And no one knew, as he did, precisely what it was worth." It seems our nation turned its lonely eyes to a proud, but empty shell; Cramer's superb book helps us understand why we did, and how DiMaggio was able to take all the good will extended him and give so little back. --Jeff Silverman


From Publishers Weekly
Listening to Cramer read his biography of Joe DiMaggio feels as though you are sitting in a bar talking baseball with a friend, only to have a grizzled regular overhear your conversation and interject pejoratively, "DiMaggio, eh? I'll tell you about DiMaggio." With a tough, throaty accent and straightforward manner, Cramer sounds as if he's telling the whole tale with his arms crossed over the back of a turned-around chair and a toothpick dangling from the corner of his mouth. And for a story about a kid rising from a large Italian family in San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf to wealth and fame as a superstar for the New York Yankees, the style fits perfectly. Cramer (What It Takes) balances the Hall of Fame outfielder's well-documented highlights--his 10 World Series titles in 13 major-league seasons, astounding 56-game hitting streak and marriage to Marilyn Monroe--with attributes the public never saw: seedy connections, loose morals and a tight fist. Cramer has ably taken his controversial text and pared it down to provide a strong audio performance that will keep his audience engaged right up until closing time. Simultaneous release with Simon & Schuster hardcover (Forecasts, Oct. 16, 2000). Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
This bio from a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist promises to deliver some shockers. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Star of the American pastime, lover of beautiful women, legend of our culture, Joe DiMaggio was far less a hero in real life than in his own imagination and those of his fans. Richard Ben Cramer, narrating his own work, tells the story behind the spin, uncovering the truths behind the testaments published throughout the ball player's life. Cramer speaks in the same clipped, unemotional manner in which he writes. His dry delivery lends no romance to the biography, and his smoky, slightly sibilant voice carries overtones of the blue-collar Yankee fans who followed DiMaggio's career. From time to time, Cramer allows a hint of amusement or disgust to flavor his performance, but overall he maintains an air of journalistic detachment suited to his text. R.P.L. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
The Yankee Clipper a type-A shark? Say it ain't so, Joe.^B Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
Ken Garcia San Francisco Chronicle An often brilliant and deeply disturbing look into the rise of one of the country's modern-day giants.


Book Description
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer, here is the definitive story of Joe DiMaggio's life -- the story that DiMaggio never would tell. This groundbreaking biography of DiMaggio -- from his first game with the Yankees in the 1930's through his rise to national hero status, and onto his lonely and mysterious death last year -- reveals startling information about his life, but becomes much more than one man's story. In Cramer's hands, DiMaggio's complicated life befomes, too, the story of America's media machine, the invention of a national celebrity in America, and the ways in which fame can both build and destroy.


About the Author
Richard Ben Cramer is the author of the bestselling What It Takes: The Way to the White House, which was acclaimed as one of the finest books ever written on American politics. His journalism has appeared in Rolling Stone, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Time, and Newsweek. His dispatches from the Middle East for The Philadelphia Inquirer won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1979. With his wife and daughter, he lives on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Joe DiMaggio had an extended honeymoon with the American public. He was a hero to baseball fans everywhere when he roamed center field in the House That Ruth Built with a grace and elegance few players have ever matched; the envy of every red-blooded American male when he married Marilyn Monroe; and considered by most the greatest living ballplayer, revered as a man of quiet dignity and class. With the publication of Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life, the honeymoon may finally be over. Richard Ben Cramer's portrait reveals that the Yankee Clipper may not have been the man we thought him to be.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

No wonder we strove for more than sixty years to give Joe DiMaggio the hero's life. DiMaggio was, at every turn, one man we could look at who made us feel good.

In the hard-knuckled thirties, he was the immigrants' boy who made it big -- and spurred the New York Yankees to a new era of dynasty. As World War II loomed, Joltin' Joe became our poster boy for American can-do, with his hitting streak of fifty-six straight -- and the nation was literally singing his name. In postwar ease and plenty, he was our Broadway Joe, the icon of elegance and manly class...until he wooed and won, in Marilyn Monroe, the most beautiful girl that America could dream up. And even when he lost that girl for good, in 1962, Joe was us at the start of our decade of national bereavement.

Joe DiMaggio was a mirror of our best self...and 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 along the way not just America's national game, but her movie stars, mobsters, pols, writers...the birth (and the price) of modern national celebrity.

This is the story Joe DiMaggio never wanted to tell -- and never wanted anyone else to tell. It is the story of his grace -- and greed; his dignity, pride -- and hidden shame. After five years of relentless reporting, Cramer brings alive, for the first time, the story of DiMaggio the man.

SYNOPSIS

Joe DiMaggio's complicated, very public, very enigmatic life is also the story of America's media machine. Back in the 1930s, when he first played with the Yankees, DiMaggio was in effect chosen to become our new national hero. How this happened, the invention of national celebrity, and the way fame both builds and destroys is the incredible story told here.

FROM THE CRITICS

Richard Bernstein - New York Times

Mr. Cramer gets us through his...narrative in brisk and lively fashion, capturing the beat of mid-century America as he proceeds..DiMaggio, in Mr. Cramer's penetrating and unforgiving illumination of him, is a scowling, calculating and sometimes cruel phantom...[Cramer] has written something more than a definitive revisionist biography of a cultural archetype. [He] has furnished us with a grand American tale....

Book Magazine - Don McLeese

News flash: DiMaggio wasn't a very nice man. The Yankee Clipper of the baseball diamond was Revoltin' Joe away from it—rude and selfish, cheap and greedy, a guy who accepted money from mobsters and pursued sex with showgirls. He abused Marilyn Monroe and treated his only son like a photo prop. He used people and was convinced that people were always out to use him. (Often, he was right.) He lived his life with a sense of what biographer Cramer calls "regal entitlement," as if the world orbited around him, because the people in his world told him that it did. One gets the sense that DiMaggio might have fared better in these pages if he had cooperated with Cramer (a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter whose What It Takes is the definitive study of presidential campaigning as a war of attrition). Since the thought of turning his life into an open book was DiMaggio's worst nightmare, Cramer met the challenge of his subject's resistance with investigative resources, a fertile imagination and myriad sources who might have had axes to grind. At its most invasively salacious, the book seems to delight in playing "gotcha!"-for it's hard to imagine any man less likely than the pathologically private DiMaggio to share the size of his penis (a "Louisville Slugger," as Cramer delicately footnotes) with the world at large. At its most incisive, this biography provides an antidote to hero worship, and an indictment of the American celebrity machine. Such a book could have been written (and some have been) about Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Michael Jordan, almost anyone the culture inflates to godlike status and then deflates for betraying our larger-than-life illusions.

Publishers Weekly

Much of the lowdown here about the ultimate American icon is controversial, but the extent to which it startles or shocks will depend on the reader's knowledge of DiMaggio (1914-1999), since rumors about him have been prevalent for years. Cramer's allegations are many. He documents how DiMaggio beat up Marilyn Monroe on at least three occasions, the most prominent time being the evening that Monroe filmed the famous scene with her dress flying up over her waist as she stands on a New York City subway grate in The Seven Year Itch. After Monroe's divorce from Arthur Miller, she and Joe had a rapprochement, and DiMaggio planned to remarry her on August 8, 1962--which turned out to be the day of Monroe's funeral. Concerning the Mob, Pulitzer Prize-winner Cramer alleges that DiMaggio knew Albert Anastasia, Sam Giancana and Frank Costello. However, although DiMaggio accepted many gifts from them, it was the mobsters who courted DiMaggio, because of his stardom--as they also pursued Sinatra--and not the other way around. (At one point, DiMaggio received a trust account at the Bowery Bank set up by Frank Costello that eventually netted DiMaggio over $1 million.) Morris Engelberg is now in the news almost daily and has made a second career for himself as the self-anointed longtime "friend" and trusted "confidant" of DiMaggio. Cramer alleges that Engelberg hijacked many of the products that DiMaggio autographed--worth well over seven figures. Cramer also focuses on what he says were Engelberg's efforts to ease DiMaggio out of this life with the help of morphine suppositories. The author of What It Takes, the epic history of the 1988 presidential race, has written a biography that will have people talking. (Oct. 17) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Cramer does a very creditable job of exploring DiMaggio's life in and out of major league baseball; he's also an excellent reader. We follow "Joltin" Joe from his teens in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood to his death from lung cancer in 1999. This is a story of how Joe the businessman parlayed his athletic talent, baseball success, and name into a personal fortune over nearly 40 years in the public eye. That he still managed to become a baseball hero seems almost coincidental to his single-minded pursuit of cashing in on his skills. Cramer gives especially fine descriptions of DiMaggio's relationships with his first wife, Dorothy, with Marilyn Monroe, and with his son, Joe Jr., each a disaster of major and lasting importance. Adult language and situations occur; highly recommended, but not for fans younger than the later teens. Cliff Glaviano, Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

AudioFile