Wait Till Next Year - A Memoir Paperback – Illustrated, June 2, 1998

Doris Kearns Goodwin is a superb writer, no ifs or buts about it. She could write a washing machine manual and I’d probably still gobble it up. She has a gift of conjuring up the past so vividly, so real, so believable, that you feel as if you’re right there with her as it’s happening. You can feel the excitement as she’s waiting for her father to come home from work so she can read him the baseball stats she painstakingly put together from that day’s game on the radio, you can hear the cheers in the ballpark as she gets to go to her very first Brooklyn Dodgers game, you are holding your breath with her when it comes down to the final strike and the final out in the last game of the season, you simply become that little girl with all her dreams and hopes and sometimes disappointments of growing up in 1950s America.I don’t think you have to be a baseball fan to love this book. It’s simply a good memoir all around. But if you love baseball, especially in the glory days of Jackie Robinson (who is Goodwin’s hero) you’re in for a particular treat. I don’t know what it is about that era, but it always has an especially strong pull on me. There were parallels to John Grisham’s A Painted House – an atypical Grisham novel set in 1950s Arkansas that in my opinion is among Grisham’s best – in that it also has the fate of a beloved baseball team as its central thread, together with the outsize role played by radio broadcasts of the games. We might have many more modern conveniences today, we might be better off in so many ways, but being transported back into this golden era of baseball by the magic of Goodwin’s storytelling will leave you with an almost painful yearning for a simpler, more wholesome world.

I am not a baseball fan. However, having said that, this was a wonderful read. I couldn't put it down. Doris Kearns Goodwin captures the essence of the 1940s and 50s in her richly-written memoir. In her deceptively simple narrative, she integrates her excitement about the Brooklyn Dodgers with all the relationships and experiences in her life, evidencing her great skill as a storyteller. She draws us in, and we are there with her. Her detailed description of various baseball plays is riveting even to non-fans. We feel her excitement entering Ebbets Field. We understand her anger at fans of the "enemy" team, and her conflict over her negative emotions. Besides baseball, the introduction of television is another major factor in her life. When the McCarthy hearings are televised. Doris and her friends innocently begin to role-play the hearings and discover the toxicity of the hearings infiltrating their play activity. Over time, they find themselves cruelly turning on each other, and wisely, decide to end the game. This is a powerful life lesson. As the 50s moves into the 60s, life for Doris, and everyone, changes in many ways. The cocoon in which she had lived begins to disappear and reveal some difficult truths. We feel her disillusion at the commercial aspect of baseball, the social inequities which existed in the world around her, and discovering the family issues from which she had been sheltered. While there were areas of difficulty in her life, the two constants were the constancy of her family relationships and baseball. The phrase associated with the Brooklyn Dodgers - "Wait till next year" becomes a philosophy of life. Don't be fooled by the title. This is a highly recommended book even for those who couldn't care less about baseball.

I have read a few of Doris' books and they are all extremely detailed and interestingly for me, this book sort of dovetailed her newest book Unfinished Love Story. I read that and it was awesome. I hated that it ended! Her historical books are the best. The only reason I gave this a 4 is the narrator. All of her other book narrators are great, especially when Doris does them herself. I have such respect for her and watch her on MSNBC as a historian and she is so great. She is in her 80s now and I am 72 so can relate to her.