Word: dimaggio
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Maury Allen doesn't get any deeper than a surface recount of DiMaggio's career. He describes the 1941 batting streak in vivid and exciting detail, offers some insight into DiMaggio's longstanding feud with the late Casey Stengel, and shares a few until now unreported tidbits about Marilyn Monroe and Joe. But mostly he allows old ex-Yankees to do the talking and many of them, particularly Lefty Gomez whose monologue goes on for pages, have a propensity for talking more about themselves than about DiMaggio...
Allen is a first-rate sportswriter for The New York Post, and if this biography was divided into a series of newspaper columns and published in the Post, it would probably hold up a good deal better. The stories are certainly interesting--how DiMaggio related to his teammates, how he held up under the pressure of the batting streak, what he did with himself in retirement. But it just doesn't seem to go anywhere specific. And sometimes it is remarkable in its total simplicity. We're never told why DiMaggio remained completely enraptured with Marilyn Monroe, 13 years after...
Allen also makes little effort to explain DiMaggio's hero status--he alludes frequently to the fact that DiMag was somehow different from everyone else in Allen's owneyes and in the nation's, but he doesn't give any hint of why. He begins the book, "I was fifteen when I first touched Joe DiMaggio. He doesn't remember it. I can never forget it." This is undoubtedly an accurate portrayal of his and others' sentiments, but to treat DiMaggio as a phenomenon and leave it at that is to skirt the issue...
...short, Allen leaves us still waiting to find out who Joe DiMaggio was and why he represented all that he did. He has done the legwork and provided a biographical base. But someone else will have to do the hard analysis...
Perhaps, as Allen and many others say in the book, no one ever really knew Joe DiMaggio. Even Marilyn never understood what it meant to be DiMaggio. Story goes that is 1954, when Marilyn returned from entertaining troops in Korea, she said to DiMag, "Joe, you've never heard such cheering." DiMaggio replied softly, "Yes I have...