It's a take-down of an athletic god in which Cramer compares DiMaggio to another baseball great, Ted Williams. I found his 2000 book, Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life, both fascinating and frustrating. (His portrait of Joe Biden remains insightful - two decades after it was written.Others may agree. In his book, Cramer complained that all the books he read about previous campaigns left unanswered "the only questions" he and most voters "ever wanted to ask" about the candidates: "Who are these guys? What are they like?" No one answered those questions better. It's not just about what it takes, but what it takes from the candidates and from all of us. It's the best book I've read about what it's like to run for president in a media age. What It Takes: The Way to the White House (1992), a group portrait of the 1988 presidential candidates, is a remarkable job of reporting. Writer Richard Ben Cramer, 62, who died Monday from complications of lung cancer, won a Pulitzer Prize as a foreign correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1979 - back in the days when papers like The Inquirer could afford foreign bureaus - but I knew him mostly as a tenacious biographer whether his subject was politics or baseball.
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