A nostalgic look at the 1950’s, baseball and family neighborhoods. While this work is probably not Doris Kearns Goodwin’s best writing I found it a delightful escape from the dysfunctional family dramas that seem abound on the book circuits these days. ( )

For me, it was a wonderful memoir of growing up in New York in the Fifties, of following the Yankees passionately. I have admired Kearns Goodwin for a long time as an historian; it was fun to learn of the more playful, fun-loving side of her personality and also to learn about the more personal side of her biography. ( )

There's something to be said for spending three hours in the dentist's chair. While you wait, you can read. I read this book. Between the bus and the dentist I finished it in a day.

Wow! What a book! Goodwin writes of her childhood through the prism of a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. Growing up in Rockville Centre, one cheered for the Dodgers, or the Yankees, or the Giants. When the Giants & the Dodgers battled for the pennant, or the Dodgers battled the Yankees in the World Series, you cheered for your team, but you kept your friends who were rooting for the other team.

Goodwin learned at age six how to keep score. She keeps score in this book, the score of her love of baseball, of growing up in '50s suburbia, of a childhood touched by the public traumas of McCarthyism, the Rosenberg trial, the Korean War, and the private trauma of her mother's illness. Every year is marked by the Dodgers' winning, or (more often) losing. Their games are the landmarks by which she marks her youth.

The things she loved: baseball, her family, her friends, her neighborhood, and reading. When she first learns to read, "I insisted on reading every sign and billboard along the way. 'Why are you doing this?' Elaine asked. 'Oh, you'll understand someday,' I replied. 'Once you start reading, you can never stop' " How true.

Goodwin is a marvelous writer. It may be that, because she is only six years my senior, I related to much of her experience. It may be that because the cry of "Wait Till Next Year" is heard in Chicago (and, boy, did Cubs fans have their heartbreak last year!), it resonates with me. But I don't think those things really account for how much I loved this book. I think what accounts for it is Goodwin's extraordinary ability to recreate in words what was really quite an ordinary childhood, and make it magical.

From my blog, http://minlshawbookshelf.blogspot.com...

Another of my reading objectives for 2009 has been addressed; my mother gave me this book for Christmas in 1997 (possibly 1998). I just never quite got round to opening it until a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, you might recognize Doris Kearns Goodwin from either her appearances as a talking head on TV (I saw her on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart not too long ago) or as author of Team of Rivals, the acclaimed look at President Lincoln's cabinet.

In Wait Till Next Year, she revisits her own childhood in 1950s Brooklyn. There are eight chapters, each more or less dedicated to one year of her youth. Because of the growing nature of childhood, each year also addresses its own themes--even though the underlying theme of this memoir is her relationship to the Brooklyn Dodgers. I rarely find myself visualizing any written work particularly clearly, and so it is a great compliment I pay to Doris Kearns Goodwin when I say that I lost myself in a vivid, nearly tangible, recreation of her childhood.

From her mother (ailing with "the heart of a seventy year old woman") to next door neighbor Elaine, from Jackie Robinson to the local Giants fan butchers who called her "Ragmop," no one is simply background for her life. I am still in awe of how, at six years of age, she would listen to every radio broadcast of every game and keep score throughout all nine innings so she could recreate the games in their entirety for her father at night. There are heartbreaking passages of loss; I literally teared up during the epilogue.

I came of age forty years after Kearns Goodwin in a small town outside Louisville, Kentucky and yet her vivid portrayal of so many universal themes made this one of the most accessible memoirs I have yet read. Do not Wait Till Next Year; put this at the top of your reading queue. ( )

Very readable story of childhood, baseball, family in the 1950s. More than a story about the Dodgers. It is the story of a block, the corner stores, her school days, and summer play. The first televisions in the neighborhood. The fear of polio in the summer. McCartney hearings, Little Rock, Sputnik. How baseball was intertwined into the lives of all the families on the block. Some were Dodgers fans, some Giants, some Yankees. And the rivalry strained friendships at times, tho briefly. Her descriptions of the events that ended the Dodgers season in defeat made my eyes burn. As did her description of the night they won the World Series in 1955. Perhaps a bit too "Pleasantville" at times, with the men all leaving for work at the same time, and returning home at 20 minute intervals. But definitely a labor of love by the author. ( )