Growing up in a doomed hometown with a missing father and a single
mother, Nicholas Dawidoff listened to baseball every night on his
bedside radio, the professional ballplayers gradually becoming the men
in his life. A portrait of a childhood shaped by a stoical, enterprising
mother, a disturbed, dangerous father, the private world of baseball,
and the awkwardness of first love, The Crowd Sounds Happy is the
moving tale of a spirited boy's coming-of-age in troubled times.