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Summary: A Great Winter Read
Review: I really miss baseball in the off season. Most books about baseball are not very intriguing and don't usually hold my interest for long. They are not usually very well written. I was given this book by a friend who lives in the same town as Doris and thought my wife and I would like it. We both loved it and give as gifts to our baseball fan friends. This book is both personal and historical. Doris recalls her childhood relationship with her team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, her local team of her youth. This is a book for a real fan who has a team and sticks with them. Her relationships with her family unfolds subtlely as she tells the story of her team and how she got sucked into a relationship with a "loser" but not really. This book will keep your head above the dug out as you wait for spring training to start up again.
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Summary: Great Book! Great Writer! Great Baseball Fan!
Review: From Ken Burns series on baseball, I knew this lady was the real deal - at least as a baseball fan. Well, she's the real deal as a writer as well. As a truly good writer would, Ms Goodwin not only shared her great memories but also caused me to visit many of my own. Thanks! I intend to give this book and others of Ms Goodwin to my wife's school library. Further, I look forward to reading No Ordinary Time.
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Summary: No, I am not a fan of baseball - but...
Review: if any writer could make me into a fan, DKG could. I was watching David Letterman one night post Sept 11th and was so captivated by this woman he was interviewing -- I didn't know who she was until after the interview but she was discussing presidents and history and New York with such enthusiasm and excitement that I found myself wanting to know more about her. Seriously, how many times do you hear a person talking about Winston Churchill with any great feeling of wonder and excitement? She was so cool that I just had to know more about her. Realizing that she was an author, I picked up this book and was not disappointed. At one point in her book, she says her dad had a nickname for her - I can't recall exactly what that nickname was but it described her perfectly (bubbles maybe?) -- curious and enthusiastic and this comes through in both her personality and her writing. If all students could have someone like DKG as a teacher -- we'd all catch her enthusiasm for history AND baseball and would be able to tell our own stories just as well as she tells hers.
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Summary: A most excellent storyteller.
Review: I have had the wonderful opportunity of hearing her speak in person and if you ever get the chance, go hear her. This was a fun book for me because my parents are the same age as DKG and while they grew up in small midwestern towns, many of the stories she shares ring very true. While very different from her presidential books, her easy to read style will allow you the devour this book in only a couple of sittings. The pictures are a joy as well as the reader is allowed a look back into yesteryear when Catholics, Jews and Protestants lived next door to each other without conflict and without a sense of separation. DKG's ability to weave her storied life around baseball shows her gift for writing and provides an excellent vehicle for the myriad emotions caused by the ups and downs of a 154 game season as well as growing up, the move to the suburbs and the loss of a parent. How many times do sports reflect life in a good way? Lately not so often, yet this book reminds us of a different era; before the designated hitter, astroturf and free agency, before a 50% divorce rate, AIDS, and 500 cable tv channels. It was a simpler time, yet DKG is not afraid to point out the sunken logs that would arise in the following decade. I am sure each reader will find their own favorite story in this book and no doubt many of you will have your heart warmed by this feel good book. DKG provides a gentle voice and reminds us all that for many folks the 50's were the calm before the storm.
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Summary: Delightful Book!
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this delightful childhood book by Ms. Goodwin as much as I loved "Memories Are Like Clouds" by Diana Dell, my aunt. I highly recommend both wonderful books. Sincerely, David McPherson
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Summary: If You Liked This Book....
Review: If you liked this book (and you are a Roman Catholic woman) you'd probably like the book Chasing Grace: Reflections of a Catholic Girl Grown Up by Martha Manning.
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Summary: "Wait Till Next Year" Love, Baseball Survivor's Story
Review: In "Summer of 98," Mike Lupica's remembrance of that classic baseball season, he describes parents and children's shared enjoyment of the game as "a love inside a greater love." In Lupica's case, the season's home run and pennnant races bonded Lupica to his children and to his father, with whom he shared Roger Maris' chase of Babe Ruth's home run record years earlier. In "Wait 'Till Next Year," what to Lupica was a daily generational journal becomes a bittersweet coming-of-age story to writer/historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Goodwin wraps her memoir around her family's shared love of the Brooklyn Dodgers: years of dissapointment (including 1951's infamous playoff loss to the New York Giants) to their 1955 championship season (recalled sweetly and vividly as the neighborhood celebration it was), and their treasonous 1958 move to Los Angeles. Goodwin grows to know and love the game, learning statistics, meeting legendary ballplayers like Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, and Jackie Robinson, sharing her passion for the game with friends and family. Goodwin's story rings more powerful for its evocation, wistfulness, and sweeping sadness. She details the human face to the classic 1950s family image: successful, loving father, doting mother, precocious children, friendly (and cantankerous) neighbors, friends, shopkeepers. She shares the summer warmth of Jones Beach, nights at Brooklyn's Ebbets Field or by the radio with Red Barber, Sundays in church loving and learning her Catholicism.(not to mention schooldays listening to the World Series, which we may never see again). Security rested in tradition: the Dodgers' starting nine, clear answers to her Cathecism, friends and family there for her and each other. The young Goodwin dreams and believes greater things, enabled by parents allowing her self-expression and growth unusual for young girls then. Her vivid imagination wins a Dodger pennant by breaking the limbs of players on rival teams, her cajoling saves the Dodgers for Brooklyn, her care helps a potentially polio-stricken boyfriend, her beauty and wiles win Rhett Butler and allow her to read every book in her public library. Throughout, Goodwin also feels the requisite Catholic guilt; her confession after attending a Campanella speech strikes you with humor and pathos. (You wish you could know more about her love for the then-new rock and roll, and how that differentiated her and her friends from their parents.) The 1950s' seismic events (Julius and Ethel Rosenberg's treason, the McCarthy hearings and her friends' eerie re-creations of them, the 1956 Arkansas school integration, Sputnik) erode her security and faith. But in Chapter Seven, Goodwin chronicles losing what she valued most: friends and a team who moved, her mother dying in her sleep, her beloved home. These permanent changes left her and her father, who endured loss throughout his life, grieving but stronger for their shared experience. (Goodwin's descriptions of her mother were particularly moving; like her, my mother was sickly, had endured loss in her past, loved to read books and passed away at an early age.) The book's title refers to the Dodgers' end-of-season mantra after years losing the World Series to the hated New York Yankees. To Goodwin and her surviving family, it is also a slogan of resilience, that through preserving the past we keep those we love -- relatives, friends, heroes, neighborhoods, eras -- close. This is consistent with Goodwin's subsequent life and career choices, from her marriage and new love of the (equally heartbreaking) Boston Red Sox, to her passing baseball tradition to her children, to her becoming a full-time historian. In "Wait Till Next Year," Doris Kearns Goodwin did in a meticulous, personal way what "Forest Gump" did as Hollywood spectatcle: insert her life and aspirations into some of history's most important events. Highly recommended.
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Summary: A Perfectly Clear Snapshot of A Time and A Place
Review: It goes without saying that Ms. Goodwin is among America's finest writers; her Pulitzer prizes prove that. Yet Ms. Goodwin herself has said in interviews that of all the books she has written, WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR seems to strike the strongest emotional chord among her readers. This book is writing at its best and, therefore, it's good reading. It will be of special interest to anyone with a passion for baseball, particularly the Dodgers, especially before the team left Brooklyn. Yet this memoir is more than just a baseball story, though that part is fascinating. It offers a good picture of the energy found in the States during those years immediately following World War II, and an excellent history of the expansion of New York City and the immediately adjacent suburbs at that same moment in time. My father and his brothers, like all little boys born in Brooklyn in the first decades of the 20th Century, were avid Dodgers fans. By 1986, three of the four brothers had died. My bachelor uncle remained alone, 85 years old, though I phoned him every day and visited him frequently. During the '86 World Series, I was trying to engage his attention; his mind was clear, but his enthusiasms had abated. So I tried to instigate a conversation. "What do you think of the Mets? Can you believe that they won the Series?" He responded, "I have to tell you, sweetheart, that after the Dodgers left Brooklyn, we never again cared that much about baseball." I understood that when he said "we," it wasn't meant in the royal sense--he was referring to three brothers who had predeceased him. My uncle died in 1994, at the age of 93. He remained a voracious reader until the day he died. The highest compliment I can pay Ms. Goodwin is that I am sorry that he did not live long enough to read WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR. It's a wonderful book, and he would have reveled in it.
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Summary: I couldn't put it down!
Review: I recieved this book as a gift for Christmas 2000 and read it almost as non-stop as I could. I'm not a baseball fan, but this was one of the most moving and well written stories I have ever read. Ms. Goodwin writes about an admittedly idyllic and innocent childhood but with such honesty and clarity of recollection that it does not come across as "Leave it to Beaver." I am ordinarily only captivated by Tom Clancy or John Grisham and was a little let down when I first unwrapped this gift, however after completing my first reading, I know that this book will be a cherished possession that I will continue to pull off the shelf for a long time to come.
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Summary: a lost world
Review: When I was six, my father gave me a bright-red scorebook that opened my heart to the game of baseball. After dinner on long summer nights, he would sit beside me in our small enclosed porch to hear my account of that day's Brooklyn Dodger game....By the time I had mastered the art of scorekeeping, a lasting bond had been forged among my father, baseball, and me. So begins Doris Kearns Goodwin's enchanting memoir of growing up in Rockville Centre, L.I. and the relationship she forged with her bank examiner father, Michael Francis Aloysius Kearns, through baseball. As she continues, she explains how this experience contributed to her becoming a historian: Through my knowledge, I commanded my father's undivided attention, the sign of his love. It would instill in me an early awareness of the power of narrative, which would introduce a lifetime of storytelling, fueled by the naive confidence that others would find me as entertaining as my father did. Goodwin is, of course, best known for her hagiographies of democrat Presidents & her frequent appearances on The Newshour, Imus and Hardball, but when Ken Burns tabbed her as a talking head for his Baseball series, she found that people at her talks were more interested in reminiscing about the Dodgers than in hearing about the Roosevelts. The result is "Wait Till Next Year", wherein she has interwoven her baseball memories with her recollections of growing up Catholic in post-War suburban America. I especially liked several of her anecdotes: (1) She tells about her first confession, where she tearfully confesses to praying that Allie Reynolds, Robin Roberts and others will be injured, though not seriously, just enough so they won't be able to play against the Dodgers (2) After winning a St. Christopher's medal (blessed by the Pope) in a catechism contest, she presents it to a slumping Gil Hodges, who accepts it reverently & tells her how he had one just like it growing up but gave it to his coal miner father to protect him. At a time when each memoir is more sensational than the next, fueling a descending spiral of confessional aberrance, it was a real pleasure to read the story of a nice normal American upbringing in a loving family & one can't help but feel that we lost something valuable with the passing of the world she describes. GRADE: B+
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