Wait Till Next Year - A Memoir

Biography & Autobiography. History. Sports & Recreations. Nonfiction. HTML:By the award-winning author of Team of Rivals and The Bully Pulpit, Wait Till Next Year is Doris Kearns Goodwin's touching memoir of growing up in love with her family and baseball. Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year re-creates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans. 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.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member TadAD

This is a memoir of historian Doris Kearns' childhood in Brooklyn and her overwhelming love for the Brooklyn Dodgers. As anyone who has read some of her of her other books knows, she can write and this one is no different. It flows; it draws you back into the 1950s when baseball was the national

pastime and television did not yet rule the land.

It is, however, a bit of a paean to that era, leaning heavily on the nostalgia button. It would be wrong to say that it was viewing things through rose-colored lenses but there's no question where the emphasis lay: communities were closer; the neighborhoods were safe; the economy was doing well; free agency hadn't ruined the concept of team loyalty.

If you're looking for something deep and incisive like Team of Rivals, this isn't the right place. If I had to choose a single word, I think it would be: pleasant.

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LibraryThing member Fernhill

Easily read memoir of Kearns and her family growing up inlove with Brooklyn Dodgers. Not her best work, she writes better about others than she writes about herself.

LibraryThing member TheAmpersand

I really wanted to like this one. I'm a guy and a baseball fan, but I've long suspected that I follow baseball like a lot of female baseball fans do: I care less about winning and statistical excellence than about the stories, personalities, culture and aesthetics of the game. So "Wait Till Next

Year" seemed like a good fit for me. After having gotten halfway through it, though, I'm dismayed to report that there doesn't seem to be enough material in here to make a book out of. We get some fond reminiscences about growing up on Long Island during the prosperous fifties, a description of the author's home life, and, yes, a lot about baseball. But what seems to be lacking is any analysis of why the game appealed to the author, or what she got out of it. She was a Dodgers fan, and this seems to have cemented the bond she had with her father...but then, what? In "Wait Till Next Year," her connection with the team and the game doesn't seem to go too far beyond standard-issue sports fan tribalism. The author, though she seems quite aware of the particular social conditions under which she grew up, seems to be hewing too close to the emotions she might have experienced as a very young Dodgers fan. But I'm still not sure what that might have contributed to her adult self. Not what I was looking for.

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LibraryThing member simchaboston

Slim but eloquent memoir that made me laugh out loud several times -- and also made me want to cry several other times. Though this is about Goodwin's childhood, this to me felt neither overly nostalgic or melodramatic. She clearly describes not just the warmth of her family and neighborhood ties,

but also the greater historical currents of racism, McCarthyism and fear of nuclear war and how they affected even her small-town upbringing. And as a Red Sox fan who's endured lots of ups and downs over the years, I completely understand the dynamics of her relationship with the Brooklyn Dodgers!

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LibraryThing member maggie1944

Doris Kearns Goodwin was born a couple years before I was and so her memoir of growing up in the 1950s brought much nostalgia to my mind. Her neighborhood in Brooklyn was both very different, and a bit the same, as my neighborhood in Seattle. My family moved away and I lost this idyllic

neighborhood when I was very young; DKG did not move from hers until high school so she has many good stories to tell. Central to her story was her, and her father's, indeed her whole family's, devotion to the Brooklyn Dodgers during the golden years of baseball. Even I, in far away Seattle, knew the names of the wonderful baseball teams and stars. It was a great time to be a kid and she does a superior job of evoking the magic of summer evenings, playing all day long with the neighborhood gang, enjoying long and deep friendships, and going to the beach; all this before TV took our family homes and closed the doors to the outside.

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LibraryThing member nmele

Excellent memoir of a father-daughter duo who love the Brooklyn Dodgers.

LibraryThing member jepeters333

Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, this is Goodwin's touching memoir of growing up in love with her family ad baseball. She re-creates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans. Goodwin

is a great writer - I enjoyed reading about the 1950s - but I got a little tired of all the baseball stories.

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LibraryThing member mypinktoes

A gift from my husband. Wonderfully readable and engaging.

LibraryThing member TakeItOrLeaveIt

I read this when I was 13-14. I loved it then.

LibraryThing member lilithcat

There's something to be said for spending three hours in the dentist's chair. While you wait, you can read. I read this book. Between the bus and the dentist I finished it in a day.

Wow! What a book! Goodwin writes of her childhood through the prism of a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. Growing up in Rockville

Centre, one cheered for the Dodgers, or the Yankees, or the Giants. When the Giants & the Dodgers battled for the pennant, or the Dodgers battled the Yankees in the World Series, you cheered for your team, but you kept your friends who were rooting for the other team.

Goodwin learned at age six how to keep score. She keeps score in this book, the score of her love of baseball, of growing up in '50s suburbia, of a childhood touched by the public traumas of McCarthyism, the Rosenberg trial, the Korean War, and the private trauma of her mother's illness. Every year is marked by the Dodgers' winning, or (more often) losing. Their games are the landmarks by which she marks her youth.

The things she loved: baseball, her family, her friends, her neighborhood, and reading. When she first learns to read, "I insisted on reading every sign and billboard along the way. 'Why are you doing this?' Elaine asked. 'Oh, you'll understand someday,' I replied. 'Once you start reading, you can never stop' " How true.

Goodwin is a marvelous writer. It may be that, because she is only six years my senior, I related to much of her experience. It may be that because the cry of "Wait Till Next Year" is heard in Chicago (and, boy, did Cubs fans have their heartbreak last year!), it resonates with me. But I don't think those things really account for how much I loved this book. I think what accounts for it is Goodwin's extraordinary ability to recreate in words what was really quite an ordinary childhood, and make it magical.

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LibraryThing member KApplebaum

The story of a young girl's love of baseball, by a master storyteller.

LibraryThing member moibibliomaniac

An excellent memoir of a girl who was a Brooklyn Dodger fan in the late 1940s and early 1950s. My brother was a Dodger fan. I was a Yankee fan. I went to one game at Ebbets Field, but quite a few games at Yankee Stadium.

LibraryThing member jessibud2

Doris Kearns Goodwin is 10 years older than I am and her background, childhood and life differ from mine in every conceivable way. Yet this book, her memoir, captured in me a sense of nostalgia that I found surprising. She is, of course, a wonderful writer, and I love when a book like this has

photos; they offer more than just an imagined glimpse into that window to the past. Every time I picked up the book to continue reading, it felt like *going home*...

I am now interested in reading more of her work, as I have always been interested in history. One of her books has won a Pulitzer Prize (No Ordinary Time, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II).

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LibraryThing member tgsalter

She grew up a Dodger fan in Brooklyn in the 1950s. the book brought back many memories for me of that period -- the safety of neighborhoods, freedom of childhood along with HUAC, the Bomb, the McCarthy hearings and more.

LibraryThing member RavenousReaders

Baseball season is here! Doris Kearns Goodwin takes a nostalgic look at growing up in the ‘50s and her devotion to the Brooklyn Dodgers. If you are disgusted by steroids and multi-million dollar contracts, this book will take you back to the glory days of baseball.

Reviewed by: Sandy

LibraryThing member cyderry

Being a baseball fan as well, it was great to see this side of such a great writer.
The stories brought back memories of my childhood - the disappointments as well as victories.

LibraryThing member christinejoseph

50's — Brooklyn — Polio — McCarthy — Catholic — Racial Schools

Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year re-creates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans.

LibraryThing member margaretfield

growing up in 1950s New York, loving the Dodgers

LibraryThing member susandennis

This was my wonderful Christmas surprise. My friend, and fellow book lover and baseball lover, Jeanie, sent me this wonderful book for Christmas. Goodwin's memoir of her years growing up on the East Coast with the baseball of the 50's and 60's was so familiar. She captures of the times of duck and

cover and mary jane shoes with a special touch. It is a wonderful trip back.

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LibraryThing member VashonJim

A sweet look at the author's childhood love affair with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and a look at what it was like growing p in the 1950s. I can't recommend it enough.

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