Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars | 2,168 ratings

Price: 16.37

Last update: 12-02-2024


About this item

Wait Till Next Yearis 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.

The narrative begins in 1949 at the dawn of a glorious era in baseball, an era that saw one of the three New York teams competing in the World Series every year, and era when the lineups on most teams remained basically intact year after year, allowing fans to extend loyalty and love to their chosen teams, knowing that for the most part, their favorite players would return the following year, exhibiting their familiar strengths, weaknesses, quirks, and habits. Never would there be a better time to be a Brooklyn Dodger fan.

But in 1957 it all came to an abrupt end when the Dodgers (and the Giants) were forcibly uprooted from New York and transplanted to California. Shortly after the Dodgers left, Kearns' 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 of an era and the beginning of another - and for Kearns, the end of childhood.


Top reviews from the United States

Eva Melusine Thieme
5.0 out of 5 stars Superb!
Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2016
Doris Kearns Goodwin is a superb writer, no ifs or buts about it. She could write a washing machine manual and I’d probably still gobble it up. She has a gift of conjuring up the past so vividly, so real, so believable, that you feel as if you’re right there with her as it’s happening. You can feel the excitement as she’s waiting for her father to come home from work so she can read him the baseball stats she painstakingly put together from that day’s game on the radio, you can hear the cheers in the ballpark as she gets to go to her very first Brooklyn Dodgers game, you are holding your breath with her when it comes down to the final strike and the final out in the last game of the season, you simply become that little girl with all her dreams and hopes and sometimes disappointments of growing up in 1950s America.

I don’t think you have to be a baseball fan to love this book. It’s simply a good memoir all around. But if you love baseball, especially in the glory days of Jackie Robinson (who is Goodwin’s hero) you’re in for a particular treat. I don’t know what it is about that era, but it always has an especially strong pull on me. There were parallels to John Grisham’s A Painted House – an atypical Grisham novel set in 1950s Arkansas that in my opinion is among Grisham’s best – in that it also has the fate of a beloved baseball team as its central thread, together with the outsize role played by radio broadcasts of the games. We might have many more modern conveniences today, we might be better off in so many ways, but being transported back into this golden era of baseball by the magic of Goodwin’s storytelling will leave you with an almost painful yearning for a simpler, more wholesome world.
Carol S Austin
5.0 out of 5 stars Wait till Next Year a real joy to read.
Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2014
If you grew up in the 50's and can remember your first tv, you may have also been a baseball fan. It was a time after the WW, when things were growing and changing. Neighborhoods were the world. You played in the street or front yards after school and all summer. There were no microwaves, and meals were eaten by the family, sit down style. The local butcher and grocer knew your name. And your baseball heroes were not paid millions; they worked during off season; they lived in the neighborhoods--they did in Brooklyn.
Doris Kearns Goodwin's dad was a real Brooklyn Dodger fan. He taught her to score a game at 4 years of age. She would lay on the round run in front of the radio (no tv then) and score the game. When her dad came home, she'd sit in his lap and play by play the game for him.
Anyone who grew up then and followed the Dodgers, knows the agony of watching their team make it to the National League as winners, go to the World Series, and......lose. That's where "Wait till next year" was their therapy. Come next year, they'd do it again, but win. There would be a next year to try again. The Dodgers were the Field of Dreams team. Maybe it was Jackie Robinson (Kearns' favorite player), or was it the band of fans, the Sym-phony players who spontaneously became a fixture, or the way the Dodgers would let kids come on field with them and sign autographs and actually talk with them. (Jackie Robison signed Kearn's autograph book, "Keep that great smile.").
It was a time before the world's problems began to again take the headlines; Kearns moves from when the world was her family and neighborhood to high school dances and downtown Brooklyn and wheen the fans in Brooklyn cheered on the first Black player, then the first Italian Black, and when the team called "Dem Bums" fought for the championship as kids and their parents worked through loss and tears to that final championship year.
You watch Kearns grow up and see the world as it was in those post WWII days. I know several teachers had their class read this book. It is a wonderful wonderful read and the feel of the early 50's is exactly as I remembered it--I grew up in Oklahoma, and it rang true for me. I think if you were a child who rooted for the Dodgers (I was), then the book is even more powerful.
The SkyWriter
4.0 out of 5 stars Growing up with Dem Bums
Reviewed in the United States on January 4, 2014
Here we have a coming of age tale about a real kid, a real place and a real childhood and a snapshot of nineteen fifties America that somehow manages to be unsentimental and steeped in historical recollection. Goodwin is a Pulitzer-winning historian who has captured the essence of an American childhood in a way not typically shown, that is from the standpoint of a girl's love of a baseball team, and the connection she shares with her father to that team. Doris and her father, Michael Aloysius Kearns, were perhaps the Brooklyn Dodgers' biggest father/daughter team of fans. Kearns' life revolved around Dem Bums, and a separate connection with her fragile mother who instilled a love of books and reading in her youngest daughter. As the seasons come and go, so do the Dodgers and the hypnotic rhythm of baseball, ordering lives and defining the hopes and dreams of Brooklynites, always hoping this will be `the year,' the holy grail will be found and Brooklyn will win the World Series. Finally, in 1955, the Dodgers behind iconic baseball names like Robinson, Campanella, Reese, Newcombe, Furillo, Labine, Podres and Dressen do win the Series, and Brooklyn goes wild.
But of course the ecstasy doesn't last. Walter O'Malley takes the team to Los Angeles, the organizing principle of life in Brooklyn dissolves and life goes on. Kearns writes as well as any non-fiction writer today, despite using an awkward kind of passive voice construction at times, with lots of `to be' verbs and would be seen's, would find their place to's etc. The story is engaging and highly readable, especially including as it does insights to many historic events like the Rosenberg trial and execution, the death of James Dean, a horrendous train wreck on the LIRR and references to popular culture in mid-century America. It's also a heartwarming tale about a father's belief in a daughter's opportunity to succeed at whatever she chooses in life when that belief was not popular or widespread.
Wait Till Next Year is more than a baseball book; it's a picture of who we once were, through the eyes of young American girl with her whole life ahead. If you enjoyed Team of Rivals, No Ordinary Time or The Bully Pulpit, you'll find a lot to like in Wait Till Next Year as well.
Byron Edgington, author of The Sky Behind Me: A Memoir of Flying & Life

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