From Library Journal
When historian Goodwin was six years old, her father taught her how to keep score for "their" team, the Brooklyn Dodgers. While this activity forged a lifelong bond between father and daughter, her mother formed an equally strong relationship with her through the shared love of reading. Goodwin recounts some wonderful stories in this coming-of-age tale about both her family and an era when baseball truly was the national pastime that brought whole communities together. From details of specific games to descriptions of players, including Jackie Robinson, a great deal of the narrative centers around the sport. Between games and seasons, Goodwin relates the impact of pivotal historical events, such as the Rosenberg trial. Her end of innocence follows with the destruction of Ebbets Field, her mother's death, and her father's lapse into despair. Goodwin gives listeners reason to consider what each of us has retained of our childhood passions. A poignant but unsentimental journey for all adults and, of course, especially for baseball fans.?Jeanne P. Leader, Everett Community Coll., Wash.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Ann Hulbert
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.


From Kirkus Reviews
Pulitzer Prizewinning historian Goodwin (No Ordinary Time, 1994, etc.) 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 re-creating 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 depression and drinking problems, the book falls far short of her compelling historical narratives. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the bestsellers No Ordinary Time — Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II and The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga, tells her own story of growing up an avid baseball fan in the 1950s in Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir. Goodwin, a lifelong fan of baseball who was featured in Ken Burns's acclaimed PBS series on the sport, celebrates one of the most glorious periods of the sport. At the same time, she remembers the people who have most influenced her life: her father, who gave her not only a love of baseball but the confidence to pursue her dreams, and her mother, a chronically ill woman through whom she came to worship books.

Wait Till Next Year takes place in a suburb of New York City in an eight-year period during which one of the three New York teams — the Dodgers, the Giants, and the Yankees — competed in the World Series every year. For Goodwin there would never be a better time to be a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, with Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges in the lineup. With equal parts tenderness and realism, Goodwin also evokes the seemingly tranquil world of the 1950s. It was a time when owning a single-family home was the realization of a cherished dream, when everyone knew everyone else on the block, when the corner stores provided most everything that a family needed, and when the great festivals of the Catholic Church provided drama, reassurance, and continuity. However, this decade was alsoatime touched by the chill of the cold war, the stifling effects of sexism, and the ugliness of racial prejudice.

A coming-of-age story that reveals the early shaping of the mind and sensibility of one of our most distinguished writers, Wait Till Next Year is a love letter to a golden age of sports and a personal chronicle of a rapidly changing society.

ANNOTATION

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

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

SYNOPSIS

A memoir of family life in the 1950s, and the loving relationship between a father and daughter who shared an adoration for baseball.

FROM THE CRITICS

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

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

Peter Delacorte

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

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

Chicago Sun-Times