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Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir

Name: Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir
Author: Doris Kearns Goodwin
ISBN: 9781568955414

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

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Overview

Wait Till Next Year is the story of a young girl growing up in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, when owning a single-family home on a tree-lined street meant the realization of dreams, when everyone knew everyone else on the block, and the children gathered in the streets to play from sunup to sundown. The neighborhood was equally divided among Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans, and the corner stores were the scenes of fierce and affectionate rivalries. We meet the people who influenced Goodwin's early life: her father, who emerged from a traumatic childhood without a trace of self-pity or rancor and who taught his daughter early on that she should say whatever she thought and should bring her voice into any conversation at any time; her mother, whose heart problems left her with the arteries of a 70-year-old when she was only in her 30s and whose love of books allowed her to break the boundaries of the narrow world to which she was confined by her chronic illness; her two older sisters; her friends on the block; the local storekeepers; her school friends and teachers. This is also the story of a girlhood in which the great religious festivals of the Catholic church and the seasonal imperatives of baseball combined to produce a passionate love of history, ceremony, and ritual. It is the story of growing up in what seemed on the surface a more innocent era until one recalls the terror of polio, the paranoia of McCarthyism reflected even in the children's games, the obsession with A-bomb drills in school, and the ugly face of racial prejudice. It was a time whose relative tranquility contained the seeds of the turbulent decade of the 60s. Shortly after the Dodgers left, Goodwin's mother died, and the family moved from the old neighborhood to an apartment on the other side of town. This move coincided with the move of several other families on the block and with the decline of the corner store as the supermarket began to take over. It was the end.

An endearing memoir of a young girl growing up loving her father and baseball.

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Editorials

Ann Hulbert

For self-esteem-building role models, for baseball lore, and inning-by-inning action, and for a lively trip into the recent American past, you can hardly do better. -- New York Times Book Review

Boston Globe

A fine writer's conscious mastery of her difficult craft.

Chicago Sun-Times

Absolutely endearing....A book you will pass on to your best friend with a "You've just got to read this."

Jim Abbott

In an era when memoirs are often characterized by salacious confessions...Doris Kearns Goodwin restores a refreshing element of innocence to the genre....Such stability rarely exists anymore, in baseball or in life. Wait Till Next Year is a chance to savor it again. -- The Orlando Sentinel

Jodi Daynard

Lively, tender, and....hilarious....[Goodwin's] memoir is uplifting evidence that the American dream still exists -- not so much in the content of the dream as in the tireless, daunting dreaming. -- The Boston Globe

Peter Delacorte

A poignant memoir...marvelous...Goodwin shifts gracefully between a child's recollection and an adult's overview. -- San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

Tom Cooper

Readable as history, as a baseball story, or simply as the tale of a remarkable girl destined to become a remarkable woman, Wait Till Next Year is everything a literary memoir should be. -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Publishers Weekly

This memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian (No Ordinary Time) is a moving ode to her father and to their shared love of baseball. The word "recollections" in the subtitle rather than "reflections," say, is an apt designation of the book's content, which is charming and endearing, though does not allow access into the author's inner life. The baseball games of Goodwin's New York City youth are dramatically and beautifully narratedit is refreshing to read about a girl's passion for the sport; her childhood love of the game and the three teams that played in the city in the 1950s is evident in every paragraph. But when Goodwin focuses on herself and her family apart from baseballher mother was chronically ill and dies in the final pages of the bookshe seems content to skim the surface of the story, with emotion held too deeply in check for what ought to have been the book's climax. Yet in the pages giving her childhood perspective on such things as race and the Army-McCarthy hearings, we behold the deep roots of this historian's success in her art.

Library Journal

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author on how baseball brought her close to her father.

The Boston Globe

A fine writer's conscious mastery of her difficult craft.

Kirkus Reviews

Pulitzer Prizewinning historian Goodwin turns her gaze inward, looking back on a childhood enlivened by books and baseball. In many ways Goodwin had a typical '50s girlhood. She grew up on suburban Long Island at a time when many families were relocating to such communities. Her father worked, her mother was a homemaker. Perhaps the biggest difference between Goodwin and other girls growing up in this era was her deep and abiding enthusiasm for baseball. When she was six, she recalls, her father gave her a score book and taught her how to use it, a gift that 'opened [her] heart to baseball.' Retelling games for her father's benefit after he came home from work was her 'first lesson . . . in narrative art.' One can easily see how recreating these games from the score book taught her to harness her imagination to quotidian details to re-create history. If baseball bonded her more deeply to her father, books served the same purpose in her relationship with her mother, a sickly woman with severe angina and numerous other problems. Goodwin also offers a child's-eye view of the Cold War, from the lunacy of bomb shelters and 'duck and cover' drills to a particularly disturbing memory of reenacting the McCarthy hearings with other neighborhood children. Gradually we see her neighborhood unraveling under economic pressures, the Dodgers and Giants moving to the West Coast, and finally, her mother dying of an apparent heart attack at 51. Regrettably, Goodwin recounts all this in unimaginative prose, offering surprisingly few original insights into either baseball or the sociopolitical currents of the time. Except for the final chapter about her mother's death and her father's subsequent depressionand drinking problems, the book falls far short of her compelling historical narratives.