It was often said of Joe DiMaggio that the reason he played so hard on the baseball field—even when his knees were blown out, his feet were infected, his back was seizing up, and he was running a fever—was that he felt he owed it to the one kid in the stands who had never seen him play. That's a noble sentiment, but with a coarse underside: What does it take for a man to think so much of himself? Richard Ben Cramer is an expert on such matters, having written What It Takes, an insightful and thorough document of the 1988 presidential campaign. He continues to investigate the constitution of public figures with Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life, in which he marvels at the New York Yankees stalwart's will to excel while detailing the arrogance and isolation in which he thrived. Cramer devotes more than half of The Hero's Life to the Yankees years (1936–1951), including Joltin' Joe's plague of injuries, his magnificent championship comebacks, the drudgery of his military service during WWII, and the contract holdouts that temporarily turned his fans against him. He draws a connection between the fickleness of fans and the media and DiMaggio's eventual distrust of both, and he shows how the slugger's suspicious nature destroyed his first marriage and led him to consort with organized-crime figures, who attended to his baser appetites while keeping those indulgences out of the papers. The rest of the biography skips across the most interesting years of the Yankee Clipper's post-baseball life: DiMaggio's short marriage (and lingering romance) with Marilyn Monroe is related as a heartbreaking cycle of passion, violence, and regret, and the cynical exploitation of the '90s collectibles market is held up as the clearest example of how DiMaggio lived his life contending that no one was going to rip him off. The weakness of The Hero's Life is that DiMaggio's own voice is missing. Cramer couldn't land an interview with the Clipper while he was alive, leading to a speculative air that makes the bio seem less than concrete. But the man is perhaps best explained by the people who brushed up against him, admired his gifts, and devoted themselves to him—until they asked for something in return and he looked away, determined that no one would make a dime off his life. When the story ends with one of the Jolter's closest associates obsessively hoarding his leavings, Cramer closes with a chilling thought: Maybe DiMaggio was right.