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Mike Cuthbert

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Wait Till Next Year

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

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Mike Cuthbert said: " One of the great joys of doing talk radio for so many years was the fact that I got to meet some great authors and scholars so many times. Nobody was more fun, informative, deeply interesting and good with callers than Doris Kearns Goodwin. Two years One of the great joys of doing talk radio for so many years was the fact that I got to meet some great authors and scholars so many times. Nobody was more fun, informative, deeply interesting and good with callers than Doris Kearns Goodwin. Two years younger than me, she has chronicled some of the great politicians of our time and of the past: Teddy Roosevelt and Taft, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedys—and herself. This relatively short volume contains memories by the bucketload from Goodwin’s youth as a Dodger fan in Brooklyn and Long Island. Her fascination with the sport was aided and abetted by her father, who used her as his personal playback machine. After every night game, he would ask her to play the game back from her copious notes in her little red books where, years before, she had learned the shorthand for baseball statistics with refinements of her own. She recounts, in this lovely volume, her first entry into Ebbets Field as a small child—as magical in her prose as it must have been that first time. I recall seeing, at the age of eight or nine, my first sight of the diamond at Wrigley Field with my father. Ironically enough, it was a game between the Cubs and Dodgers, featuring the most magical athlete I had seen up to that point, Jackie Robinson. I can still recall how his throws seemed to explode out of his glove, past his ear, to first base. I can still remember his speed and agility on the basepaths. Robinson was Goodwin’s favorite player. She treasured his autographed picture that she got from him after patiently waiting in line to see him. But in this book there is more than baseball. Goodwin grew up in the 50s and she traces her growth as a political individual through those tumultuous times. Even today, school children have no idea what it must have been like to expect an atomic bomb attack at any moment as they dived under their desks in the most insanely useless civil defense drills ever. Today’s kids have only semi-automatic rifle fire to fear from an individual; the 50s kids had to cope with the potential ending of the planet. She also lived through the days of Selma and Central High School in Little Rock. Perhaps the saddest pages in this memoir are those near the end in which she limns the piece-by-piece destruction of her old neighborhood as families aged and moved out to the more distant suburbs. Lifelong friends were lost, assumptions about the continuity of life were shattered and parents aged and died, along with relatives. For Goodwin, historian though she is, was human enough to forget what history taught her about the frailty of life and relationships—she thought her life was set in the same place and that it would never really change. As she has developed theories of history that explain things to millions of readers, so this little book informs us as to how the historian was formed. Explaining her continuing optimistic nature one can only turn to the title of her book: “Wait Till Next Year.” ...more "

Jan 12, 2024 09:41AM · see review