Wait Till Next Year

A touching memoir of growing up in love with family and baseball from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Team of Rivals and Leadership in Turbulent Times.

Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year 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.

We meet the people who most influenced Doris Kearns 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.

“Endearing recollections of a feisty girlhood in the prefeminist, prosperous, confident 1950s on Long Island, in the orbit of the Brooklyn Dodgers.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Lively, tender, and . . . hilarious . . . [Goodwin’s] memoir is uplifting evidence that the American dream still exists—not so much in the content of the dream as in the tireless, daunting dreaming.” —The Boston Globe

“A poignant memoir . . . marvelous . . . Goodwin shifts gracefully between a child’s recollection and an adult’s overview.” —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review