Not a very flattering account of the man. I didn't know much about Joe D. before reading the book. No reason to think the author's account is inaccurate, and it makes me wonder why Joe D. was such a jerk. Hard to get through mostly because I really didn't like the person I was reading about. ( )

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) ( )

3488. Joe DiMaggio A Hero's Life, by Richard Ben Cramer (read Sept 25, 2001) This is a gossipy, warts and all biography, and since I was always against the Yankees I did not mind at all the depiction of DiMaggio as a thoroughly despicable human being, albeit a fantastic player. The book has no footnotes, and its note on sources basically gives only names, without attributing anything in the book to any specific name. I am not sorry I read the book, but it is not a very worthwhile book. ( )

Reviews by Ron Kaplan appear in January Magazine, Elysian Fields Quarterly and Bookreporter.com ( )