When they'd get to her place and she'd drop that dress on the floor (there was never anything on underneath), and scrub all that shit off her face, and drop the towel coming out of the bathroom, lit perhaps by the one bulb behind her, or the blue of the TV he'd flicked on ... and there she was, his girl, so pale, past vanilla, it was white in her young skin -- dairy milk -- and perfect, tiny-boned, delicate, like a twelve-year-old virgin, childlike as her giggle when he grabbed her, then, covered her with him, filled her, crushed her, sometimes (Christ forgive him) he was trying to kill her ... God, he never wanted to jolt anybody like this girl.

"The blue of the TV"? "Like a twelve-year-old virgin"? Exactly whose fantasy are we wallowing in here? (I don't know about Joltin' Joe, but I have a pretty good idea who Benny would like to jolt -- Christ forgive him.) Here's a scene aboard Joe's fishing boat apparently described to the author by an acquaintance of Joe's, named Dario: "Marilyn couldn't hold on with her hands, so she'd hugged the pole to her body with her left arm, while she tried to reel in with her right hand. She had the pole mashed up against her ample breasts, which were pretty well mashed up by some half-bra anyway ... to Dario, it looked like near over-load." And now -- thanks to Cramer -- to us, too.

This is strange territory for a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter to roam, though of course George Bush -- the subject of Cramer's acclaimed "What It Takes: The Way to the White House" -- never got to see Marilyn Monroe's towel drop. Nevertheless, all the talk in "Joe DiMaggio" of baseball, money and sex gets a little mind-numbing after 560 pages. Five hundred and sixty pages! I've read six biographies of Lincoln that weren't so long.

Ah, but then the Yankees weren't quite so invincible in Lincoln's time as in DiMaggio's. Cramer is very good on the baseball stuff, much better than, say, David Maraniss was in the football scenes in his much better book, "When Pride Still Mattered," a biography of Vince Lombardi. Joe DiMaggio was so much more than a baseball player to so many people for so long that it's easy to forget that he wouldn't have been any of these things if he hadn't been a great ballplayer first, and Cramer's account of those championship seasons (which owes much to David Halberstam's superb "The Summer of '47") is perhaps the best yet.

But baseball, of course, is not what "Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life" is about. It's about, as Cramer intimates in his prologue, the cloak of myth and how it shrunk around DiMaggio over the course of his life; about how a vain, spoiled, selfish, shallow man -- "there hadn't been a day of his life, either at home or on the road with his club, when his needs and wants had not been seen to by others" -- could have become perhaps the most revered living legend in American culture.

This is, perhaps, a great idea for some kind of book, but not a biography, because the real Joe DiMaggio isn't interesting enough to hold a 560-page book together -- especially when there's no baseball or Marilyn Monroe around. The truly interesting subject is not DiMaggio, but exactly what it was about this not particularly intelligent son of a Sicilian fisherman that made American intellectuals from Ernest Hemingway ("Have faith in the Yankees, my son. Think of the great DiMaggio") to Paul Simon ("Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?") fawn over him. Cramer's answer to this question is ultimately unsatisfying. "He was, at every turn, one man we could look at who made us feel good. For it was always about how we felt ... It was always about us." Yes, OK, but why did we pick him when there were so many other, worthier candidates around?

Cramer doesn't really try to answer that question. Instead, he relentlessly, pulverizingly tells us that the man wasn't worthy of the legend built up around him -- possibly not even worthy of such a biographer. You can almost hear Cramer's "tsk tsk" on every page. And should we mistake the tone, he sometimes spells his disapproval out for us: "The fact was, DiMaggio was never wistful. And he never spent an instant of his life to marvel at the beauty of anything." (Except, perhaps, Marilyn's dairy-milk skin?) Cramer, it appears, knows everything about Joe DiMaggio except a good reason for writing about him.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"