Rating: 
Summary: Growing Up with the Brooklyn Dodgers
Review: "Wait Till Next Year"
Doris Kearns Goodwin
ISBN 0-684-84795-7This 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: Baseball Memories
Review: Anyone who's seen Ken Burns's BASEBALL will know Doris Kearns Goodwin. She was one of the few women interviewed. After she appeared in BASEBALL, many people asked her about her baseball experiences growing up, so she wrote this memoir. She writes about her growing years in the forties and fifties, not only as a baseball fan but also as a Catholic and a member of a neighborhood where everyone knew everyone else. DKG is four years younger than I, and our early lives had much in common. I, too, grew up a Catholic and a baseball fan (the Cleveland Indians) and lived in a neighborhood with a butcher shop, a fruit and vegetable market, and two drug stores with soda fountains. Unfortunately, I didn't grow up to be a Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of political biographies. If you grew up in a middle-class suburb in the forties and fifties, this book will make you yearn for the "good old days" when, in spite of the threat of nuclear destruction and Joseph McCarthy, life seemed simple, safe, and solid. It really did.
Rating: 
Summary: A Great Book about a Great Game
Review: As a genre, baseball books are of two general types- the rarely interesting memoirs of a jock or coach, or the baseball writer/enthusiast's dissection of the game in general, or of a season or team in particular. "Wait Until Next Year" by Doris Kearns Goodwin is of the latter genre. A lifelong baseball fan who grew up in a Long Island suburb of New York City, Goodwin grew up rooting for her father's favorite team- the Brooklyn Dodgers in what many regard as the golden age of baseball, the late 1940s and early 1950s. It was an era where the Dodgers went to six World Series in ten years (1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1955, and 1956) and won the title over the hated Yankess in 1955. It was an era that saw baseball integrated by Jackie Robinson, and some of the best players in history (Robinson, Duke Snider, Willie Mays, Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Billy Martin) wowed the fans time and again with their spectacular play. And Goodwin watched it all while growing up. "Wait Until Next Year" is as much a memoir of growing up in suburban Long Island in the 1950s as it is a remembrance of what baseball was like in that long-gone era. Anyone who followed sports as a kid can remember what it was like to watch their heroes on the television, fervently hoping they may emerge victorious (this baseball fan was crushed to watch the big, bad Oakland A's slaughter his heroes, the San Francisco Giants, in the 1989 World Series) or being so fortunate to actually attend a game in the flesh. This reader smiled as he read Goodwin's memories of attending a game at Ebbets Field, her horror at Robby Thomson's miracle home run in the 1951 playoffs that lifted the Giants over the Dodgers, her satisfaction with the Dodgers triumph in the 1955 World Series, and finally her sadness at the Dodgers decision to depart for Los Angeles in 1957. A very good book that even non-baseball fans will find hard to put down.
Rating:
Summary: I Loved This Book
Review: Doris Kearns Goodwin has done it again. This is a memoir of her growing up years and her ties to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Her accounts of scoring the games and then the great anticipation of telling her father play by play what happened in the evening are touching. It's just a great story. Well written. I would give it more than five stars if I could.
Rating:
Summary: A beautiful memoir of baseball, childhood, & ties that bind
Review: Goodwin has a taken a beating from some of the other reviewers here, due to revelations of borrowing the work of others. Not being intimately familar with that controversy, I read this book with an open mind. I knew Goodwin from her many TV pundit jobs and her wonderful memories in Ken Burns' "Baseball" (an unparalleled work of genius by the way). Anyway, I loved the book. It is another a long line of wonderful Dodger books. However, this one has a special touch of being the memories of a young girl (a perspective one still does not hear enough about sports) and her homelife. Goodwin's father and mother were wonderful people. Her memories of her growning in the '50s reminded of the emotions evoked by the seminal TV series The Wonder Years a decade or so later. She writes beautifully of how the world (her world really) lost it's innocence when the Dodgers left. How she lost her mother, friends, etc. She talks briefly of her wonderful transformation from Brooklyn to Boston fan and her own family. The story left me in tears. A beautiful piece of personal history. As a history teacher and Cubs fan (with Brooklyn Dodger blood from my ancestors), I was moved and this is indeed history at it's best. Detailed, filled with awe and honor, and always personal.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful treat
Review: I enjoyed this book the first and second time I read it. Doris Kerns Goodwin writes about her early years in post-war Long Island with grace.
This memoir reads like a charming novel - the details are wonderful, the characters are people we come to care about, and young Doris is someone you will smile with and cry with.
I've recommended this book to friends and students (I teach adult ed creative writing workshops). Everyone thanks me. If you want a good book by a good author check this one out. If you're considering writing your own memoir study WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR to see how it should be done!
Rating:
Summary: Thank You
Review: I have read that authors read reviews by readers. I hope Ms. Goodwin reads this. This is simply a wonderful book
This is the second time I read this book. I read this for a book club. I had remembered the portions about baseball and the wonderful relationship between Ms. Goodwin and her father. The rereading does not diminish the pleasure of this portion of the book.
The second reading permitted me to think about the the insightful description of growing up in the 50's--an experience I share with Ms Goodwin. It was a simpler time when fathers came home the same time and mothers stayed home and raised the children. Children owned the streets and everyone was growing together. Ms. Goodwin also points out that it also was a time when woman could not work. A simpler time is not always the better time.
The most interesting portion of the book on the second reading is the foreshadowing of what is required to be a historian. Joining her ability to recreate a ball game as the beginning of her career as a historian, which she points out depends upon the ability to tell a story. SEcond when historical events such as the integration of Little Rock we see her mastery of history.
I used to think that No Ordinary Times was my favorite book. I will reread that as well but right now it has taken second place.
Rating:
Summary: For Baseball lovers.
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book. She paints a picture of her childhood home Rockville Centre that is wonderful. She describes the baseball games with such detail. I honestly could not put the book down. I liked the way she discussed historical events throughout the book.
Rating:
Summary: For Baseball lovers.
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book. She paints a picture of her childhood home Rockville Centre that is wonderful. She describes the baseball games with such detail. I honestly could not put the book down. I liked the way she discussed historical events throughout the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Doris, is this really you or a copy
Review: I use to read Ms. kearns books and was mesmerized by some of the information. Unfortunately, now my only excuse to even peruse a book is to determine whose work she was stealing this time. It is a disgrace to think she is capable of pontificating and expoinding on subjects when her ideas are those of other more original and creative thinkers. I wonder what she is capable of producing on her own.
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