Book #12: Wait Till Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote one of the best books I've ever read: Team of Rivals about Abraham Lincoln. SO SO GOOD. After I read that, I wanted to read everything else she'd written, so I put this one on my to-read list on Goodreads. I finally got around to it four months ago and then promptly lost it in the car, and found it again last week. This isn't a history or biography like the other books I've read by her--it's a memoir about her time growing up outside of New York City in the 40s and 50s, and particularly about her personal love of the Dodgers baseball team and their annual attempts to win the World Series. She talked about her family and relationships, how she learned to keep score of baseball games with her dad, how they would sit and listen to games over the radio and eventually watch them on TV, how their neighborhood was like one big extended family where all the kids ran in and out of each other's houses constantly. She writes about it being so idyllic, living the suburban life of the 1950s--it reminded me a little bit of Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid and his experiences growing up at the same time somewhere in the midwest. It was well-written and moderately absorbing, but honestly, it may have been more interesting if I were a baseball fan (since it is mostly a baseball memoir--she writes about each season of the 50s for the Dodgers with great detail). I also thought after she spent so much time writing and explaining about how much she loves the Dodgers, it felt a little anticlimactic for how little she wrote about them leaving to go to Los Angeles just a few years later. She obviously was sad about it, but she didn't seem to spend all that much energy on it. The last chapter kind of petered out as she wrote about her childhood ending and her mother dying. Overall, it was well-written, but not sure I will ever feel the need to read it again.