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Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil
Jerome Charyn
Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil
Yale University Press
March 2011
On Sale: March 8, 2011
192 pages
ISBN: 0300123280
EAN: 9780300123289
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Sports
As the New York Yankees' star centerfielder from 1936 to
1951, Joe DiMaggio is enshrined in America's memory as the
epitome in sports of grace, dignity, and that ineffable
quality called "class." But his career after retirement,
starting with his nine-month marriage to Marilyn Monroe, was
far less auspicious. Writers like Gay Talese and Richard Ben
Cramer have painted the private DiMaggio as cruel or
self-centered. Now, Jerome Charyn restores the image of this
American icon, looking at DiMaggio's life in a more
sympathetic light. DiMaggio was a man of extremes, superbly talented on the
field but privately insecure, passive, and dysfunctional. He
never understood that for Monroe, on her own complex and
tragic journey, marriage was a career move; he remained
passionately committed to her throughout his life. He
allowed himself to be turned into a sports memorabilia money
machine. In the end, unable to define any role for himself
other than "Greatest Living Ballplayer," he became trapped
in "a horrible kind of minutia." But where others have seen
little that was human behind that minutia, Charyn in Joe
DiMaggio presents the tragedy of one of American sports'
greatest figures.
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