books:

	Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir Doris Kearns Goodwin Simon & Schuster, 1998 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 187 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

We meet the people who most influenced Goodwin's early life: her mother, who taught her the joy of books but whose debilitating illness left her housebound: and her father, who taught her the joy of baseball and to root for the Dodgers of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges. Most important, Goodwin describes with eloquence how the Dodgers' leaving Brooklyn in 1957, and the death of her mother soon after, marked both the end of an era and, for her, the end of childhood.

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great story about a child and her father with the love of the dodgers as thier strongest bond

Doris Goodwin is a Pulitzer Prize winning author. She is a democrat and mostly she writes about politics. However several years back she took part in Ken Burns documentary film on baseball and portrayed her memories and love of the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s and later as an adult in Massachusetts, the Boston Red Sox.

This stimulated her to reflect on her childhood days as a Dodger fan and she decided to write a book about it. But as she carefully researched her memory and her past she found that it was all intertwined with her life groing up as an impresionable girl on Long Island in the 1950s. Her parents her friends and her future wriing career were all tied togehter. So this delightful book is a memoir of her childhood growing up and living and dying for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
I am 55 years old, slightly younger than Goodwin but I too grew up in the 1950s on Long Island and can relate to many of her experiences. She discusses how she started learning about baseball and the Dodgers when her father taught her how to fill out a scorecard. In the evenings during their quiet time together she would use the scorecard like a cue to narrate the game she listened to on the radio that day. This brought the game to life for her father and created an interest in her in narration that carried on into a career of writing.

The book flows marvelously and you see the world from the eyes of an impressionable grammar school girl. Goodwin is somehow able to go back and put herself back in the mind of that little naive child. We see her devotion to the Catholic church, the fear of polio in the ealry 1950s before the vaccines. I know this so well as I contracted polio in the summer of 1953 though I never got it so bad as to need an iron lung. We here of her confessions as she admitted to her priest that she wished harm on the Dodger opponents. We learn about the kids in the neighborhood, all Dodger, Giant or Yankee fans. I was a Yankee fan but my brother and all my friend that I played ball with as a kid were Dodger fans. The Dodgers were the most popular team in New York. They were the underdogs and the team for the common working man.

Goodwin's first boyfriend was a boy she got to know because he was a Dodger fan and they could talk so comfortably about the Dodgers. This is a story about the Dodger players she admired; Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Don Newcombe and Carl Furillo and the Yankees and Giants that she dispised, Mays, Mantle, Martin, Berra and others. It is a story about devotion and heartbreak; Bobby Thomson's home run, the story of Mickey Owens' dropped third strike. Billy Martin's heroics is 52 and 53. But it is also the thrill of 1955 when Dodger fans finally didn't have to say wait till next year.

As all this goes on we also hear about her mother's health problems and her childhood girlfriends, the beginning years of television, the Army - McCarthy hearings, the cold war, the civil defense drills and the fallout shelters, memorable events for those growing up in the 1950s.

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Baseball and Life

Wait Till Next Year is about baseball and life. It is the title of Doris Kearns Goodwin's memoir of childhood. Set in suburban New York in the `50s, and lived before the backdrop of baseball, the account follows Goodwin through her childhood ending when she is fifteen at the death of her mother Helen, and the move from the family home. The opening line: "When I was six, my father gave me a bright-red scorebook that opened my heart to the game of baseball."

When Thomas Kearns teaches his daughter to keep a scorecard on each Brooklyn Dodger game he initiates her love for baseball, as well as for telling a compelling narrative. Baseball bonds their relationship. With careful records Doris relives each game with her father after he comes home from work. Baseball permeates other relationships. Doris listens to games on the radio after school with her mother. Her first boyfriend shares her love for baseball; her best girlfriend Elaine does too, although she was a rabid Giant's fan. The repetitive disappointment about the team's poor results demanded optimistic philosophy. Ever hopeful of winning a pennant, "wait till next year" became the family theme at the close of a season of defeat.

Defeat overwhelms the Kearns' family when Helen dies. For a time Thomas' grief was inconsolable. Doris threw herself into activity and study. One of the final scenes in the book takes place in the attic. Doris and her father are looking at a box of old scorebooks. Thomas admits he cannot live in the house anymore without his wife. It is time to move on. Baseball continues, as does their family. Cycles repeat. In the final pages of the memoir Doris initiates her own sons into the culture of baseball teaching them, like her father had taught her, how to keep a scorebook. Like her father she opens her sons' hearts to the game of baseball. "Wait till next year" prevails.

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Really Good Read!

Ms. Goodwin knows how to tell a good story. In addition to telling us about her childhood in a New York City suburb in the 1950s, she also talks about the changes America was going through in this time period: economic development and the impact on the family, the beginnings of the civil rights movement, the "end" of baseball as the American pasttime. The book is well-written and very enjoyable.


Wait till Next Year

Most interesting for me since I am a "wait till next year" Red Sox fan. She's an excellent writer and commentator and this lives up to her standard.


Reminds me of College

As a college drop out I am not what many people might consider well read. While school was never my strong suit, and studying was an event that rarely ever happened, I did manage to read a few great books along the way. My first and best semester of college I read Wait 'til Next Year. While I am not a fan of sports and am not competitive at all, this book was beautifully written and takes the reader on a tour through the author's life, all in the language of baseball. Using the sport as a way to framework the personal story was a wise choice as it gives great metaphors and context to the tale. I suppose I also have good memories tied into the novel as well, considering that I did really well grade-wise that semester and I remember really enjoying this book when I read it at that time.

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