Wait Till Next Yearis the story of a young girl growing up in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, when owning a single-family home on a tree-lined street meant the realization of dreams, when everyone knew everyone else on the block, and the children gathered in the streets to play from sunup to sundown. The neighborhood was equally divided among Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans, and the corner stores were the scenes of fierce and affectionate rivalries.The narrative begins in 1949 at the dawn of a glorious era in baseball, an era that saw one of the three New York teams competing in the World Series every year, and era when the lineups on most teams remained basically intact year after year, allowing fans to extend loyalty and love to their chosen teams, knowing that for the most part, their favorite players would return the following year, exhibiting their familiar strengths, weaknesses, quirks, and habits. Never would there be a better time to be a Brooklyn Dodger fan. But in 1957 it all came to an abrupt end when the Dodgers (and the Giants) were forcibly uprooted from New York and transplanted to California.Shortly after the Dodgers left, Kearns' mother dies, and the family moved from the old neighborhood to an apartment on the other side of town. This move coincided with the move of several other families on the block and with the decline of the corner store as the supermarket began to take over. It was the end of an era and the beginning of another and, for Kearns, the end of childhood. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

This memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian (No Ordinary Time) is a moving ode to her father and to their shared love of baseball. The word "recollections" in the subtitle rather than "reflections," say, is an apt designation of the book's content, which is charming and endearing, though does not allow access into the author's inner life. The baseball games of Goodwin's New York City youth are dramatically and beautifully narrated‘it is refreshing to read about a girl's passion for the sport; her childhood love of the game and the three teams that played in the city in the 1950s is evident in every paragraph. But when Goodwin focuses on herself and her family apart from baseball‘her mother was chronically ill and dies in the final pages of the book‘she seems content to skim the surface of the story, with emotion held too deeply in check for what ought to have been the book's climax. Yet in the pages giving her childhood perspective on such things as race and the Army-McCarthy hearings, we behold the deep roots of this historian's success in her art. Photos not seen by PW. (Oct.) From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

When historian Goodwin was six years old, her father taught her how to keep score for "their" team, the Brooklyn Dodgers. While this activity forged a lifelong bond between father and daughter, her mother formed an equally strong relationship with her through the shared love of reading. Goodwin recounts some wonderful stories in this coming-of-age tale about both her family and an era when baseball truly was the national pastime that brought whole communities together. From details of specific games to descriptions of players, including Jackie Robinson, a great deal of the narrative centers around the sport. Between games and seasons, Goodwin relates the impact of pivotal historical events, such as the Rosenberg trial. Her end of innocence follows with the destruction of Ebbets Field, her mother's death, and her father's lapse into despair. Goodwin gives listeners reason to consider what each of us has retained of our childhood passions. A poignant but unsentimental journey for all adults and, of course, especially for baseball fans.‘Jeanne P. Leader, Everett Community Coll., Wash. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

For Doris Kearns of Rockville Centre in Long Island, New York, religion--Roman Catholicism at the Gothic St. Agnes Church--was a given, but baseball in a region blessed with three outstanding teams was a choice. Unlike the Freidles next door and the local butchers, who supported the hated Yanks, the Kearns family chose the Dodgers with a passion that had six-year-old Doris keeping a detailed score book, which allowed her to describe every game to her bank-examiner father when he came home from work. The remarkable '50s in New York baseball, together with the rituals of her church and the universal preoccupations of childhood, lend structure to this involving memoir by the Pulitzer Prize^-winning author of No Ordinary Time (1994). As in her studies of the Roosevelts, Lyndon Johnson, and The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Goodwin superbly weaves together the universal and the particular: experiences she shared with millions of other war babies and boomers, and those unique to a specific place, time, and family. And what a great start for life as a historian: obsessively following da Bums from 1949 to 1958! --Mary Carroll From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.