When I was six, my father gave me a bright-red scorebook that opened my heart to the game of
    baseball. After dinner on long summer nights, he would sit beside me in our small enclosed porch to
    hear my account of that day's Brooklyn Dodger game....By the time I had mastered the art of
    scorekeeping, a lasting bond had been forged among my father, baseball, and me.
        -Doris Kearns Goodwin

So begins Doris Kearns Goodwin's enchanting memoir of growing up in Rockville Centre, L.I. and the relationship she forged with her bank examiner father, Michael Francis Aloysius Kearns, through baseball. As she continues, she explains how this experience contributed to her becoming a historian, "Through my knowledge, I commanded my father's undivided attention, the sign of his love.  It would instill in me an early awareness of the power of narrative, which would introduce a lifetime of storytelling, fueled by the naive confidence that others would find me as entertaining as my father did."

Goodwin is, of course, best known for her hagiographies of Democrat Presidents & her frequent appearances on The Newshour, Imus and Hardball, but when Ken Burns tabbed her as a talking head for his Baseball series, she found that people at her talks were more interested in reminiscing about the Dodgers than in hearing about the Roosevelts. The result is Wait Till Next Year, wherein she has
interwoven her baseball memories with her recollections of growing up Catholic in post-War suburban America.

I especially liked several of her anecdotes:

(1) She tells about her first confession, where she tearfully confesses to
praying that Allie Reynolds, Robin Roberts and others will be injured, though
not seriously, just enough so they won't be able to play against the Dodgers

(2) After winning a St. Christopher's medal (blessed by the Pope) in a catechism
contest, she presents it to a slumping Gil Hodges, who accepts it reverently &
tells her how he had one just like it growing up but gave it to his coal miner
father to protect him.

At a time when each memoir is more sensational than the next, fueling a descending spiral of confessional aberrance, it was a real pleasure to read the story of a nice normal American upbringing in a loving family & one can't help but feel that we lost something valuable with the passing of the world she describes.

(Reviewed:)

Grade: (B+) Orrin C. Judd

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