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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: 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly delightful!
Review: Memoir of Doris Kearns' younger years, as an avid Brooklyn Dodgers fan. Although baseball was her obsession, the story is about much more than baseball - it's about life in the 50's, childhood spent outside or at the corner soda shop, the importance the community had at that time, and the troubles and changes that adolescence brings. Great memoir, and incredibly well written and told. I thought the book was excellent, even though I glossed over the baseball parts of it! Read this for my library book group, I never would've picked this one up on my own.
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