Wait Till Next Year (Sports Classics) - Softcover

When historian Goodwin was six years old, her father taught her how to keep score for ‘their’ team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, which forged a lifelong bond between father and daughter. Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year is a coming-of-age memoir in the era of Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese and Duke Snider, when baseball truly was a national pastime that brought whole communities together.

With her radio by her side and scorecard to hand, she recreates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans. Weaved between the games and the seasons, Goodwin tells the story of a changing America – from the lunacy of the Cold War alarm drills to McCarthy and the Rosenburg trials – as well as her own loss of innocence encapsulated by her mother’s death, her father’s lapse into despair and the Dodger’s departure from Brooklyn in 1957 following the destruction of the iconic Ebbets Field stadium.

Poignant, unsentimental and deeply eloquent, Wait Till Next Year is a profound memoir about childhood and loss, baseball, and the power of sport to bind families and heal loss and reveal as metaphor the evolving heart of a nation.

Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, "Wait Till Next Year" is Doris Kearns Goodwin's touching memoir of growing up in love with her family and baseball. She re-creates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans.

We meet the people who most influenced Goodwin's early life: her mother, who taught her the joy of books but whose debilitating illness left her housebound: and her father, who taught her the joy of baseball and to root for the Dodgers of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges. Most important, Goodwin describes with eloquence how the Dodgers' leaving Brooklyn in 1957, and the death of her mother soon after, marked both the end of an era and, for her, the end of childhood.