Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life »

With personal profiles on some of history's greatest legends like his breakout book Joe DiMaggio: A Hero's Life, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Richard Ben Cramer is an expert on what makes men like DiMaggio as fascinating out of the spotlight as they are while under its glare.

Joe DiMaggio's complicated, very public, very enigmatic life is also the story of America's media machine. Back in the 1930s, when he first played with the Yankees, DiMaggio was in effect chosen to become our new national hero. How this happened, the invention of national celebrity, and the way fame both builds and destroys is the incredible story told here.

New York Times - Richard Bernstein

Mr. Cramer gets us through his...narrative in brisk and lively fashion, capturing the beat of mid-century America as he proceeds..DiMaggio, in Mr. Cramer's penetrating and unforgiving illumination of him, is a scowling, calculating and sometimes cruel phantom...[Cramer] has written something more than a definitive revisionist biography of a cultural archetype. [He] has furnished us with a grand American tale....