Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Wait Till Next Year (Amazon.com link) tells the story of the author's childhood in Rockville Centre, New York in the 1950s. Despite the book not being very long (257 quick pages, including a good deal of photographs), the author goes into detail in at least the following areas:

• Her family, including its history, joys, and tragedies.
  
• Her friends, neighbors, and community, including the inevitable decline in community as the decade wore on,
• Her experiences in school and the Roman Catholic Church,
• Her increasing understanding of events of national significance,
• And, last, but not least, what it was like to grow up as a Brooklyn Dodgers fan and the how baseball was and can be a uniting force in families and communities. (As a aside, I was planning on adding a link to a cool Brooklyn Dodgers web site, but I couldn't find one on the first page of Google results.)

One thing I find striking is how much more unsupervised her childhood was compared to those of my children, while my childhood was probably somewhere in-between. Getting into the reasons for this would be a topic for another blog entry.

Back to the book: I found it to be a very good read. If you're not a baseball fan, don't be scared by the apparent baseball theme of the book -- baseball certainly isn't the main point. I suppose I could consider that to be a negative, but I won't. I enjoyed it and would recommend it to just about anyone who would think it might be interesting. Four stars out of five.