{"id":10227,"date":"2021-06-05T18:55:39","date_gmt":"2021-06-05T22:55:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/?p=10227"},"modified":"2022-01-24T07:31:49","modified_gmt":"2022-01-24T12:31:49","slug":"wait-till-next-year-by-doris-kearns-goodwin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/05\/wait-till-next-year-by-doris-kearns-goodwin\/","title":{"rendered":"“Wait Till Next Year” by Doris Kearns Goodwin"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Copyright 1997 by Blithedale Publications Inc. Published by Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is a book about baseball and family and the loss of neighborhoods in America. Kearns’ childhood obsession with the Brooklyn Dodgers is recounted with deeply personal memories. Baseball becomes intertwined with her family – especially the sickness and death of her mother, but also her sisters and father. Her childhood friends also had a baseball nexus as she and her best friend were the most avid baseball fans among the children of Rockville Center NY – Kearns a devoted Dodgers fan and her best friend Elaine a Giants fan. The travails of the Brooklyn Dodgers – seven times to the World Series without a championship – mirrored the personal tragedies of her family and others in her close-knit neighborhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Wait till next year” was the mantra of the long-suffering Dodgers fans. And, she realizes as she reaches adulthood, it is indeed the mantra of life, the optimism that keeps us going when all seems lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am a baseball fan. And not just any baseball fan but a Boston Red Sox fan. Kearns notes, in her epilogue, that her second team – the Red Sox – had much in common with the Dodgers of her youth. I can attest that “wait till next year” was also, before 2004, the mantra of every Red Sox fan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I enjoyed this book despite the fact that, in many ways, it is a downer. The Dodgers and Giants both abandon New York. Her mother dies. Her father, who had suffered a series of catastrophic losses before marrying, falls into a deep depression. A neighbor dies while watching baseball on TV. She loses the close friends of her youth. The neighborhood disintegrates as people die or move away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But all of that makes the book a poignant memoir. The Dodgers provide the glue that binds the memories together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

7 out of 10.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Copyright 1997 by Blithedale Publications Inc. Published by Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York. This is a book about baseball and family and the loss of neighborhoods in America. Kearns’ childhood obsession with the Brooklyn Dodgers is recounted with deeply personal memories. Baseball becomes intertwined with her family – especially the sickness and death of … Continue reading »<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1VniU-2EX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10227"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10899,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10227\/revisions\/10899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}