Rating: 
Summary: Nicely written and very interesting.
Review: I wanted to read this book because I so enjoyed the author's participation in Ken Burns's baseball documentary. It was interesting to learn that she actually wrote the book AFTER that project, because so many people started asking her about her baseball memories. The book tells the story of her own life - family experiences, Catholic upbringing, etc. - interwoven with her love of baseball and esp. the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Rating: 
Summary: Growing up with Baseball
Review: Doris Kearns Goodwin's story is a memoir of growing up on Long Island and rooting for the Dodgers with a father who had no sons. If you were a Brooklyn Dodger fan in the 1950s your team was decidedly first division, but your hopes would always die with the Yankees in the World Series. Wait Until Next Year!The descriptions of her father's sad upbringing and the loss of her mother make this a coming of age tale as much as a baseball one. Baseball was a way for Doris to relate to her father and have identity in her neighborhood of Giants and Yankees fans. As a young girl she would listen to the Brooklyn Dodger games and keep score to show her father later. She would hang out at the Butcher Shop and gloat to the butcher when her Dodgers beat his Giants. As she grew up, she would see baseball change mirrored in social change. Baseball allowed her favorite player Jackie Robinson to play in 1947, and some years later President Eisenhower ensured the schools of Little Rock would also be colorblind. Like a good novel, the Dodgers did eventually win the World Series in 1955. And, of course, the Dodgers would leave Brooklyn as young Doris Kearns shed childhood for adolescence. In some ways I wish the book was more about baseball and less a memoir, but I was thrilled that a young girl in the 1950s would have the same experiences and excitement growing up with baseball as I did in the 1970s. For those who truly understand and love America's game, this book is worth your time.
Rating:
Summary: Let this be the year!
Review: There isn't much of a plot to "Wait Till Next Year"--Brooklyn girl and rabid Dodger fan grows up very Catholic in the late '40s and early '50s, while her mother slowly wastes away and dies. The title is a catch phrase that Brooklyn Dodgers fans used over and over again when their team was eliminated from the pennant race for yet another year. Dodgers trivia jostles against family history, and wonderful set-pieces on, for instance what it was like to own the first television on the block. If you were a city girl who grew up during this same period in America, many of the author's stories will resonate with you: not being able to play in the water on a hot summer's day, not even a wading pool, because of your parent's fear of polio; ducking under your desk or filing down into the furnace room during your school's air-raid drills; the book-and-brick smell of the local public library, where each of the books had a date-stamped sheet glued to its back cover.
Is that really me and my sister in the photograph on the back cover, or did all little girls wear bangs and plaid back then? The most angst-filled stories in the book were about the author's father, who raised his young sister after being orphaned at an early age. His brother died of tetanus, his mother in child-birth, and his father, of grief. His one remaining sister died a few years later in a freak accident, but he managed to pull himself together after all of those untimely deaths, educated himself, got married, had children, became a Brooklyn Dodgers fan--all of this without self-pity or rancor. Maybe he really did belong to 'The Greatest Generation.' This is a sweet coming-of-age story, guilelessly told--an excellent read for a nostalgic baby-boomer or a rabid baseball fan.
Rating:
Summary: the Brooklyn Dodgers and life growing up in the 50s
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Living Another Life
Review: One of the best things about reading is getting to share lives very different from the reader's own. In the hands of a truly gifted writer the reader can experience people, places and events that would never have touched him/her otherwise. Such is true of WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR. In the New York of the 1950s when summer meant lazy days and baseball, and everyone met at the corner drugstore for ice cream sodas and egg creams, the entire world seemed to be either Yankee fans or Dodger fans. Goodwin's skillful portrayal of that world charms and fascinates. Hers was a happy and lively childhood filled with love of family and friends and The Brooklyn Dodgers. Time must pass, though, and children must become adults. The end of Goodwin's childhood is marked by the death of her Mother and the removal of the Dodgers to Los Angeles in the late 1950s. She has captured the charm of the period, a period that looks innocent enough to us now but was fraught with danger and fear of the unknown at the time. Although times change and the world evolves, memories keep a joyous past alive in the hearts that experienced it. What a blessing it is to us all that Goodwin can wield a mighty pen to bring her personal history along with the story of the gilded age of baseball alive for those of us who were blessed with other stories. Sunnye Tiedemann (aka Ruth F. Tiedemann)
Rating:
Summary: A glimpse of an era........
Review: I have enjoyed may of Goodwin's of biographies, but found htis memoir to (of course) be writen with so much warmth. Her descriptions made me feel as if I was in that house, seeing and feeling all of this bygone era. I loved her descriptions of a Long Island childhood- trips to Jones Beach, the awe of New York City. She captures the wonder of childhood and the bittersweetness of growing up. I am glad that I read this book and truly felt welcomed by Goodwin's world
Rating:
Summary: Wait Till Next Year Review
Review: .... WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR is a story about a girl growing up in the suburbs on Long Island. What could be a boring life story, Doris Kearns Goodwin makes everything exciting, and a story worth telling. The book is an autobiography of her life. One story of hers that I especially liked is the author explaining her plan for her neighborhood to be safe if they got bombed by Russia. She explained that underneath the local stores were connected basements, large enough to fit her whole neighborhood to fit it. She would bring Monopoly, so she wouldn't be bored, and most importantly, her baseball cards. The main character, the author, was a girl who thought differently than most young girls. She had many questions on religion, current events, and her family history, all at a young age. She explained things with comparisons like how when the Dogers left Brooklyn and Jackie Robinson retired, a chapter in her life closed. I would recomend this book to almost anyone. Many people can relate to it. If you either grew up in the suburbs, lived with a sick loved one, or had a love for baseball, you should read WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR.
Rating:
Summary: Wait Till Next Year Review
Review: Wait Till Next Year
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Maraysa Schwartz, Monroe, Ct. WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR is a story about a girl growing up in the suburbs on Long Island. What could be a boring life story, Doris Kearns Goodwin makes everything exciting, and a story worth telling. The book is an autobiography of her life. One story of hers that I especially liked is the author explaining her plan for her neighborhood to be safe if they got bombed by Russia. She explained that underneath the local stores were connected basements, large enough to fit her whole neighborhood to fit it. She would bring Monopoly, so she wouldn't be bored, and most importantly, her baseball cards. The main character, the author, was a girl who thought differently than most young girls. She had many questions on religion, current events, and her family history, all at a young age. She explained things with comparisons like how when the Dogers left Brooklyn and Jackie Robinson retired, a chapter in her life closed. I would recomend this book to almost anyone. Many people can relate to it. If you either grew up in the suburbs, lived with a sick loved one, or had a love for baseball, you should read WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR.
Rating:
Summary: Growing Up with the Brooklyn Dodgers
Review: "Wait Till Next Year"
Doris Kearns Goodwin
ISBN 0-684-84795-7 This memoir of Doris Kearns Goodwin's childhood on Long Island brings back memories of growing up the 1950's. She tells how all the neighbors in her subdivision knew one another, how their children played together through all the houses, and how the first neighbor to get a television set in 1946 invited all the others over to watch, at a time when there were only 7,000 sets in the entire country. Mrs. Goodwin's story of following the ill-starred Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team along with her family and most of her community of Rockville Center evokes a melancholy for an America that slipped imperceptibly away from those of us who lived through the time. I long ago ceased to care about major league baseball and the millionaires who play it. They go where the money is, but the players of the fifties mainly stayed with the same team for most of their careers. Reading the names of the 1950's Brooklyn lineups in this book -- names like Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, Don Newcombe, Duke Snyder, Preacher Roe, and Johnny Podres - re-acquainted me with my long lost knowledge of the teams and players of those days. It was charming to read about how the young Doris Kearns schemed to break Gil Hodges out of a hitting slump one year by giving him her St. Christopher's medal and how much she treasured a long-sought autograph finally obtained from Jackie Robinson, major league baseball's first black player. The portraits that Mrs. Goodwin paints of her mother, who died when the author was fifteen, and her father are created with fine strokes. Her frail mother taught her to respect people, such as a poor, elderly Ukrainian woman in a rundown house whom the neighborhood children thought was a witch. Her father gave her a guide for the struggles of life through a love of baseball and loyalty to the long-suffering Dodgers. From 1941 through 1953, six times the Dodgers won the National League championship and six times they faced the New York Yankees in the World Series and lost. But in 1955, the Brooklyn Dodgers played the Yankees a final time in the Series and won, four games to three. In a fifteen-minute period that followed the game more phone calls were made in the immediate area than at any time since VJ day. Trading on the New York Stock Exchange pretty much came to a standstill. Thousands of people converged on Brooklyn to dance in the streets. The headline the next morning in "The New York Daily News", with a twist on the hopeful slogan that had been the watchword of Dodger fans for years, read, "This is Next Year!" It is fitting that Mrs. Goodwin, a well-known presidential historian, endowed her own sons with a love of the game of baseball. After all, one of the better things that one learns from sports, as this book affirms, is to take pride in the accomplishments of the past and to look forward optimistically to the future.
Rating:
Summary: Ebbets Field And A Little Girl's Heart
Review: To appreciate the quality of this work, consider for a moment the many ways it could have been manhandled. Too much emphasis upon the Dodgers-Yankees-Giants rivalry of the 1950's would have produced a superficial sketch of 1950's baseball, already more than adequately recounted by David Halberstam, among others. Worse, the author might have adopted an "Angela's Ashes" style of dramatizing a childhood that was in fact comfortable middle class living in post-War Long Island. Or much worse, we might have gotten yet another "growing up Catholic" Gothic tale of terror. Doris Kearns Goodwin found the proper balance, so that the uniqueness of this work rests not upon her description of baseball, the Eisenhower administration, or American Catholicism, but upon a surprisingly intimate portrait of her childhood that reveals more of her personal mysteries than perhaps she herself realizes. The cultural institutions she highlights-particularly baseball-are in reality the metaphors by which she discovers herself and invites us to share in those discoveries. That the author is an American public treasure-an author of note, the congenial presidential scholar who shares titillating historical gossip on national TV with the likes of Tim Russert and Don Imus-gives us more motivation to follow her psychological musings. "Wait Till Next Year" is a memoir of the author's childhood between the ages of five and twelve, roughly 1949 through 1956. Doris Kearns was the last of three daughters of Michael and Helen Kearns. Michael Kearns commuted to New York on the Long Island Railroad and made very decent money as a middle level bank officer; he owned a home in Rockville Center, and poverty was never a factor in the author's upbringing. Doris Kearns did well in school, had lots of friends, and objectively speaking, enjoyed the benefits of robust American prosperity. All the same, her childhood was marked with sadness, fear, and trauma. Some of these features were cultural: the author recalls recoiling from a televised picture of Joe McCarthy, crouching on the floor during an atomic bomb drill, and avoiding public places for fear of polio. But her major crosses were within the family, and specifically involving her mother. Helen Kearns, we learn gradually, is wasting away. In many understated ways the author chronicles her decline-her mother's need for silence and naps, her pallor and angina attacks, her inability to do strenuous things that other mothers did with and for their daughters. Young Doris Kearns confesses to a very natural ambivalence-worry about her mother's life coupled with resentment over her mother's limitations. Those who do not follow baseball do not have an appreciation for the psychological grounding it provides its followers in times of stress. Doris was introduced to radio broadcasts of timeless baseball by the time she was five, and soon after she mastered the art of official scoring in a red score book purchased for her by her father, who kindly shielded from his daughter the fact that all of New York's many newspapers carried the box scores for public consumption. Doris thus enjoyed the satisfaction of replaying each afternoon's games for her father as he sipped his evening cocktail. She attributes this experience with implanting the basic skills of research and story telling, the prerequisites for an up-and-coming historian of note. The author's substantive emotional involvement with "Dem Bums," the Brooklyn Dodgers, was in fact the tonic that helped her weather the cultural and familial storms of her youth. And the bonds established between father and daughter through the medium of baseball helped her to forgive him in her later teen years when her father's grief led him into a period of gross insensitivity to his daughter's needs. I found myself more than a little envious when I learned in the epilogue that the author, by now the famous Dr. Kearns-Goodwin, literally reconstructed her old neighborhood in middle age through a meticulous search of records for her old Rockville Centre chums, whose interviews enrich the telling of this very personal tale. I understand her motivation as I progress through middle age. We are always in dialogue with the child within us, or at least the child we think were. What hinders us most often is a lack of information, and what we desire is a pilgrimage backward to legitimate past experience. This work at hand is Doris Kearns Goodwin's journey into her past. It was certainly not a painless adventure. But in turning the final page, the reader is pleased that at least one child-adult was able to cross to the other side and go home again.
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