To be sure, the book is about Joltin' Joe DiMaggio, the sweet-swinging Yankee Clipper who was one of the best to ever play the game, and certainly one of America's greatest sports heroes. But Charyn is not a sportswriter (he considers himself a "novelist and cultural critic" and has won several prestigious fellowships and awards for his fiction) and baseball is, at most, a supporting actor in this story about DiMaggio's darkest demons. Rather than retell the ubiquitous story of The Streak, or spend a half dozen chapters drooling over the "Jolter's" awe-inspiring talent, Charyn assumes the much more difficult task of exposing DiMaggio's struggles to the public eye. He succeeds, and the resulting pages are simultaneously compelling, frustrating, and perhaps most poignantly, depressing.
For many Yankees fans in my generation -- those who grew up in the eighties and nineties -- Joe DiMaggio was first and foremost a Hall of Famer. An all-time Yankee great with a 56-game hitting streak, a prized single-digit uniform number, and a giant plaque in Monument Park. He was a famous song lyric within a famous Simon & Garfunkel song and, unavoidably, we knew him as Mr. Coffee and Mr. Marilyn Monroe. Perhaps we're a little too young to remember how DiMaggio looked when he played the game, but that's where Charyn steps forward in chapter two, "The Walloping Wop." He hits all the usual stuff: the Dago's graceful strides in center field, his strong, quick wrists, his fierce (a favorite word of Charyn) and unbreakable concentration. But he also discusses some aspects of DiMaggio's time in pinstripes that we don't hear about often. How Babe Ruth left a leadership void in the Bronx that Lou Gehrig, "just a good old plowhorse," could not fill and DiMaggio could. How DiMaggio effortlessly hit his way into the majors in 1936. How long it took the Yankees to integrate after Jackie Robinson, and how blind DiMaggio was to the introduction and significance of black ballplayers, even after he went head-to-head with Jackie Robinson in the hotly-contested 1951 World Series. How intense DiMaggio would approach the game; intense enough that teammates were afraid to fail and therefore "risk DiMaggio's displeasure."
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