Wait Till Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin was a solid memoir by the historian who wrote bestsellers on Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson.
In Wait Till Next Year, the 76-year-old Goodwin recounts her childhood growing up in New York in the 1950s, with the book about her family, friends, and passion for the Brooklyn Dodgers. It's covered how she became a fan at the age of six in 1949, from her father teaching her how to write down the action from a baseball game on the radio. He would return home from his job as a bank examiner for the State of New York and she recount the day's Dodgers game to him out of her scorebook, something that she notes instilled in her the power of narrative storytelling.
At this time there were three New York baseball teams, the Dodgers, Giants, and Yankees, and Kearns Goodwin as a young girl met the players and noted how they largely nice people, with her favorite player Dodgers second baseman Jackie Robinson, who in 1947 had become the first African-American in the Major Leagues. Baseball was a a thread of shared experience through the community, with in school, the principal or teacher at times letting all the students listen on the radio to a key playoff game, and in 1955, Vin Scully announced the game when the Dodgers won the World Series.
Kearns Goodwin wrote of how she got a love of baseball from her father, love of books from her mother, someone beset by illness and a voracious reader who would also read to her in bed each night, and love of family from both. Additionally, there were so many shared experiences by all in the neighborhood, and it noted how when she young, it seemed that people were in things together. As she grew up, Kearns Goodwin noted that "television, once a source of community became an isolating force," and then in high school the civil rights movement began to swirl in the country and she saw the hate in people, but referenced having great teachers during her later adolescent years.
To write the book, Kearns Goodwin went back and reported on her childhood, interviewing many people whom she hadn't been in touch with for decades, and it helped create a good book about a very different time.