Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Fourth Printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Wendell Minor (Jacket Illustration and Design). 25 cm, 261, [7] pages. Illustrations. Front DJ flap price clipped. Inscribed by the author. Doris Helen Kearns Goodwin (born January 4, 1943) is an American biographer, historian, and political commentator. She has authored biographies of several U.S. presidents, including Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream; The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga; No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995); Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln; and her most recent book, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. In 1967, Kearns went to Washington, D.C. as a White House Fellow during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. After Johnson left office in 1969, Kearns taught government at Harvard for 10 years, including a course on the American presidency. During this period, she also assisted Johnson in drafting his memoirs. Her first book Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, which drew upon her conversations with the late president, was published in 1977, becoming a New York Times bestseller and provided a launching pad for her literary career. A sports journalist as well, Goodwin was the first female journalist to enter the Boston Red Sox locker room. She consulted on and appeared in Ken Burns's 1994 documentary Baseball. By the award-winning author of "Team of Rivals "and "The Bully Pulpit," "Wait Till Next Year" is Doris Kearns Goodwin's touching memoir of growing up in love with her family and baseball. Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, "Wait Till Next Year" 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.