Durham
Nicholas Dawidoff
Regulator BookshopThere are unhappy childhoods and fondly remembered childhoods. Then there are the famous intellectuals whose childhoods were enhanced by the comforts of baseball, which form a fine subset of memoir writing all its own. But where Roger Kahn, author of the classic The Boys of Summer, was no ballplayer, Nicholas Dawidoff, author of The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness and Baseball, can claim facility with the bat and glove: He played until a college knee injury forced him to focus on Harvard's more traditional offerings. His new memoirsporting ecstatic blurbs from Jonathan Franzen, Michael Pollan and Joan Acocellatells the story of growing up with his mother, who was forced to forge ahead by herself after her husband succumbed to madnessa story Dawidoff told in a famous New Yorker essay in 2000. He reads tonight at 7 p.m. David Fellerath
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