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Title: WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR: A MEMOIR by Doris Kearns Goodwin ISBN: 0-684-84795-7 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 01 June, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.65 (105 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Growing Up with the Brooklyn Dodgers
Comment: "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: 5
Summary: "Wait Till Next Year" Love, Baseball Survivor's Story
Comment: 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: 5
Summary: For Baseball lovers.
Comment: 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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Title: No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin ISBN: 0684804484 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 01 October, 1995 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: The Human Comedy by William Saroyan ISBN: 0440339332 Publisher: Laurel Pub. Date: 01 January, 1989 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream by Doris Kearns Goodwin ISBN: 0312060270 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 01 July, 1991 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Growing Up American: Immigrant Children in America Then and Now (Twayne's History of American Childhood) by Selma Cantor Berrol ISBN: 0805741046 Publisher: Twayne Publishers Pub. Date: 01 March, 1995 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Growing Up by Russell Baker ISBN: 0452255503 Publisher: Plume Books Pub. Date: 01 June, 1995 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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