Wait Till Next Year

New York: Simon & Schuster Inc. BOOK: Remainder Mark; Corners, Spine Bumped; Light Shelf Rub to Boards; Edges Lightly Soiled. DUST JACKET: Lightly Creased; In Archival Quality Jacket Cover. SUB-TITLE: A Memoir. BOOK NUMBER: 10972450. JACKET ILLUSTRATION AND DESIGN BY: Wendell Minor. BACK COVER PHOTOGRAPHS, TOP ROW, FROM LEFT: Courtesy of The Lubar Family; Courtesy of the Author; Courtesy of The Schimmenti Family. Bottom Five Photos: AP/Wide World Photos DESIGNED BY: Edith Fowler. SYNOPSIS: Wait Till Next Year is 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. We meet the people who influenced Goodwin's early life: her father, who emerged from a traumatic childhood without a trace of self-pity or rancor and who taught his daughter early on that she should say whatever she thought and should bring her voice into any conversation at any time; her mother, whose heart problems left her with arteries of a seventy-year-old when she was only in her thirties and whose love of books allowed her to break the boundaries of the narrow world to which she was confined by her chronic illness; her two older sisters; her friends on the block; the local storekeepers; her school friends and teachers. This is also the story of a girlhood in which the great religious festivals of the Catholic church and the seasonal imperatives of baseball combined to produce a passionate love of history, ceremony, and ritual. It is the story of growing up in what seemed on the surface a more innocent era until one recalls the terror of polio, the paranoia of McCarthyism reflected even in the children's games, the obsession with A-bomb drills in school, and the ugly face of racial prejudice. It was a time whose relative tranquillity contained the seeds of the turbulent decade of the sixties. 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, an 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, with Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges, with five pennants won in the course of eight years and a first-ever world championship. But never would there be a worse time, for 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, Goodwin's mother died, 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 Goodwin, the end of childhood. Doris Kearns Goodwin won the Pulitzer Prize in history for No Ordinary Time, which was a New York Times bestseller in both Simon & Schuster and Touchstone editions. She is also the author of the bestsellers The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. She is a regular panelist for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and appears frequently on Today, Good Morning America, CBS Morning News, and Nightline. She lives in Concord, Massachusetts, with her husband, Richard Goodwin, and their three sons.. First Edition 1st Printing. Hard Cover. Fine/Fine. Illus. by Wendell Minor. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Remainder.