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Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (平装)
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
| Category:
Memoir, Baseball |
| Market price: ¥ 168.00
MSL price:
¥ 148.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
A magnificent tale of growing up, a vivid and delightful memoir of a Brooklyn childhood with a love for baseball. |
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AllReviews |
1 2   | Total 2 pages 11 items |
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Ann Hulbert (The New York Times Book Review) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-18 00:00>
In a season awash in X-rated memoirs, Wait Till Next Year is an anomaly: a reminiscence that is suitable, in fact ideal, for a preadolescent readership of not just girls but boys too. Move over, Judy Blume, Matt Christopher and the American Girl doll books. For self-esteem-building female role models, for baseball lore and inning-by-inning action and for a lively trip into the recent American past, you could hardly do better. |
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Jodi Daynard (The Boston Globe), USA
<2007-01-18 00:00>
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.
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Peter Delacorte (San Francisco Chronicle Book Review) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-18 00:00>
A poignant memoir... marvelous... Goodwin shifts gracefully between a child's recollection and a adult's overview.
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Maggie Gallagher (The Baltimore Sun) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-18 00:00>
As the tenured radicals attempt to rewrite our nation's history, the warm, witty, eloquent personal testimony of someone of Doris Kearns Goodwin's stature is well worth reading. |
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-18 00:00>
Doris Goodwin is a Pulitzer Prize winning author. She is a democrat and mostly she writes about politics. However several years back she took part in Ken Burns documentary film on baseball and portrayed her memories and love of the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s and later as an adult in Massachusetts, the Boston Red Sox. This stimulated her to reflect on her childhood days as a Dodger fan and she decided to write a book about it. But as she carefully researched her memory and her past she found that it was all intertwined with her life groing up as an impresionable girl on Long Island in the 1950s. Her parents her friends and her future wriing career were all tied togehter. So this delightful book is a memoir of her childhood growing up and living and dying for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
I am 55 years old, slightly younger than Goodwin but I too grew up in the 1950s on Long Island and can relate to many of her experiences. She discusses how she started learning about baseball and the Dodgers when her father taught her how to fill out a scorecard. In the evenings during their quiet time together she would use the scorecard like a cue to narrate the game she listened to on the radio that day. This brought the game to life for her father and created an interest in her in narration that carried on into a career of writing.
The book flows marvelously and you see the world from the eyes of an impressionable grammar school girl. Goodwin is somehow able to go back and put herself back in the mind of that little naive child. We see her devotion to the Catholic church, the fear of polio in the ealry 1950s before the vaccines. I know this so well as I contracted polio in the summer of 1953 though I never got it so bad as to need an iron lung. We here of her confessions as she admitted to her priest that she wished harm on the Dodger opponents. We learn about the kids in the neighborhood, all Dodger, Giant or Yankee fans. I was a Yankee fan but my brother and all my friend that I played ball with as a kid were Dodger fans. The Dodgers were the most popular team in New York. They were the underdogs and the team for the common working man.
Goodwin's first boyfriend was a boy she got to know because he was a Dodger fan and they could talk so comfortably about the Dodgers. This is a story about the Dodger players she admired; Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Don Newcombe and Carl Furillo and the Yankees and Giants that she dispised, Mays, Mantle, Martin, Berra and others. It is a story about devotion and heartbreak; Bobby Thomson's home run, the story of Mickey Owens' dropped third strike. Billy Martin's heroics is 52 and 53. But it is also the thrill of 1955 when Dodger fans finally didn't have to say wait till next year.
As all this goes on we also hear about her mother's health problems and her childhood girlfriends, the beginning years of television, the Army - McCarthy hearings, the cold war, the civil defense drills and the fallout shelters, memorable events for those growing up in the 1950s. |
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Ron Hunka (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-18 00:00>
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.
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Mimi Levine (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-18 00:00>
Wait Till Next Year, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, is a stunning autobiography about the connections between her hometown, her school, and her team. The book, based in the 1950's, gives tremendously reliable and accurate information on baseball, predominantly her favorite team the Brooklyn Dodgers. Goodwin's collection of beaten red scorebooks served as a diary of her whole life. At age six Goodwin's father taught her to keep score and "a lasting bond had been forged among my father, baseball, and me" (Wait Till Next Year. Goodwin. 13).
Goodwin had a passion for Jackie Robinson's career as the second baseman for the Dodgers and the first black player in the major leagues. Goodwin documents the careers of other favorite Dodger players: Don Newcombe and Roy Campanella (two other black players playing for the Dodgers), Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, and rookie pitcher Clem Labine. The book is about her childhood and her keen interest in the Brooklyn Dodgers, their games, players, and box scores. Growing up in an intimate bedroom community of New York City, all the neighbors were close. Goodwin lived a sheltered, storybook life. At the end of the book, as Goodwin gets older, her perfect unravels. First, her neighborhood disintegrated, neighbors moved to cities all over the country. The Brooklyn Dodgers moved to the West Coast, along with another New York baseball team, the Giants. One baseball team remained in New York, the Yankees. Her best friend Elaine moved to Albany. Goodwin's mother, who had been suffering from a failing heart condition, died leaving her father incredibly distraught. Goodwin's father sold the only home his children had ever known, because it was tainted with memories of his late wife.
I would recommend this book to anyone with a love and a passion for baseball. The thrill of hearing every detail makes the games easily imaginable. For a baseball-lover like me, remembering some of the greatest players in history and reliving some of the most exciting games ever played is a major thriller. Goodwin does an incredible job transcribing these games and players from her red scorebook memories with meticulous detail; one can easily live in every moment. This book reads easily, but slowly. If you love to live in your books, Wait Till Next Year is a good choice for you.
Goodwin writes in very scrupulous detail, thus, the book reads very slowly. Her meticulous dwelling on some subjects can be dull and provide an excuse to skip a page or two. While Wait Till Next Year is an easy read, the multiple pages of detail on each subject make the book a very slow read. It is a long book, and her extensive points slow your speed of reading. Wait Till Next Year is an intriguing story that provides its readers with insight into baseball. The passion that the author shared with her father provides the backdrop for learning about this riveting game, which truly is a Great American Pass-time.
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Anthony Pizza (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-18 00:00>
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.
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Orinn Judd (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-18 00:00>
When I was six, my father gave me a bright-red scorebook that opened my heart to the game of baseball. After dinner on long summer nights, he would sit beside me in our small enclosed porch to hear my account of that day's Brooklyn Dodger game... By the time I had mastered the art of scorekeeping, a lasting bond had been forged among my father, baseball, and me.
So begins Doris Kearns Goodwin's enchanting memoir of growing up in Rockville Centre, L. I. and the relationship she forged with her bank examiner father, Michael Francis Aloysius Kearns, through baseball. As she continues, she explains how this experience contributed to her becoming a historian:
Through my knowledge, I commanded my father's undivided attention, the sign of his love. It would instill in me an early awareness of the power of narrative, which would introduce a lifetime of storytelling, fueled by the naive confidence that others would find me as entertaining as my father did.
Goodwin is, of course, best known for her hagiographies of democrat Presidents & her frequent appearances on The Newshour, Imus and Hardball, but when Ken Burns tabbed her as a talking head for his Baseball series, she found that people at her talks were more interested in reminiscing about the Dodgers than in hearing about the Roosevelts. The result is Wait Till Next Year, wherein she has interwoven her baseball memories with her recollections of growing up Catholic in post-War suburban America.
I especially liked several of her anecdotes:
(1) She tells about her first confession, where she tearfully confesses to praying that Allie Reynolds, Robin Roberts and others will be injured, though not seriously, just enough so they won't be able to play against the Dodgers
(2) After winning a St. Christopher's medal (blessed by the Pope) in a catechism contest, she presents it to a slumping Gil Hodges, who accepts it reverently & tells her how he had one just like it growing up but gave it to his coal miner father to protect him.
At a time when each memoir is more sensational than the next, fueling a descending spiral of confessional aberrance, it was a real pleasure to read the story of a nice normal American upbringing in a loving family & one can't help but feel that we lost something valuable with the passing of the world she describes.
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Michael Berquist (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-18 00:00>
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.
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1 2 | Total 2 pages 11 items |
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