Ezra's Bookshelf

Wait Till Next Year

by Doris Kearns Goodwin · 276 pages · ~5 hrs

Biography & Memoir

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Doris Kearns Goodwin, known for her presidential biographies, turns to her own childhood in this memoir of growing up in suburban New York during the 1950s. At the heart of the book is her relationship with her father, who taught her to keep score of Brooklyn Dodgers games so she could recite the day's events when he returned from work. Baseball becomes a lens for understanding the era: the integration of the sport through Jackie Robinson, the neighborhood loyalties that divided Dodgers, Yankees, and Giants fans, and the heartbreak when the Dodgers left for Los Angeles. Goodwin evokes the texture of 1950s life—the Friday night boxing matches on television, the Catholic parish's role in community life, the expectations placed on girls—with warmth but also honesty about the era's limitations. Her mother's illness and eventual death threads through the narrative, as baseball provided father and daughter a way to connect while loss loomed. The book is simultaneously a personal reminiscence, a social history of suburbia in the postwar years, and a meditation on how the games we love shape our identities and relationships.

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