Cheap Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (Book) (Doris Kearns Goodwin) Price

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Customer Reviews of Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir

Safe At Home
Doris Kearns Goodwin took a break from national history to get personal in this 1997 memoir of her experiences growing up a Long Island girl in the 1940s and 1950s rooting for the hard-luck Brooklyn Dodgers. Like Bob and Ray used to say, her loss is your gain. <
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>I admit approaching this book with some trepidation. Clearly the book was inspired by Goodwin's participation as one of many talking pinheads on Ken Burns' self-important 1994 TV documentary "Baseball." On that show, where various hoi pollois traded their mortarboards for Yankee caps and extolled the Wagnerian ideal of a Whitey Ford fastball, Goodwin was a frequent, annoying presence, obviously trotted in to water down the testosterone as if George Will wasn't enough to accomplish that. <
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>And for the first hundred pages of this not-big book, I felt justified in my prejudices, as Goodwin fills her pages with pat descriptions of suburban life loosely connected to a baseball team she writes about her enthusiasm for without any evident enthusiasm. <
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>But once the book got going, my opinion changed. That happened when little Catholic Doris enters a confessional before her first Holy Communion. With wholesome piety, she tells the priest her darkest, most sinful secret: A wish that Yankee pitcher Allie Reynolds would break his arm. <
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>That's not all. "I wished that Enos Slaughter of the Cards would break his ankle, that Phil Rizzuto of the Yanks would fracture a rib, and that Alvin Dark of the Giants would hurt his knee." <
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>The priest is put out, not at her fantasies of carnage but because he's a Dodgers fan, too: "I believe they will win the World Series someday fairly and squarely," he tells her. "You don't need to wish harm on others to make it happen." <
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>But it's easy to imagine Doris thinking otherwise, especially after Bobby Thomson slams a Ralph Branca fastball along with the Dodgers' hopes for making the Series in 1951. As Goodwin writes about that and later seasons, her account takes on a riveting poignancy that reminds one why Goodwin's books are so celebrated in the first place, not for her originality as a historian but for her synthesizing skill as a writer. <
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>She even gets the chance to see her heroes close up, and unlike the baseball stars of today, they don't disappoint. Gil Hodges accepts her gift of a St. Christopher medal to help him out of a batting slump with gentle affection. Jackie Robinson signs her autograph book with a bit of hard-earned wisdom: "Keep your smile a long, long while." <
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>No, the book's not perfect. It starts slow, and her attempts to tie her childhood in with big stories of the day like the Army-McCarthy hearings and the integration standoff in Little Rock feel like strained, politically correct cocktail chatter rather than a real accounting of a young life amid confusing times. <
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>But most of the way through, you get a really sweet and sharp picture of what it was like to care about baseball when it was worth caring about. Goodwin has a gift for making history live again in the pages of her books, and like Ebbets Field, presents her readers here with a real diamond in the rough.

VERY ENJOYABLE
I love Doris Kearns Goodwin's work, and this book is no exception. It's very different from her other books, but very enjoyable. It brought me back to my childhood while reading about hers. <
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>Very short in comparison to her other books, but worth the time and the money. <
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>I have heard complaints that she got some of the baseball facts wrong, but I am not a baseball historian, so this didn't bother me in the least bit. <
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