September 29, 1997
This memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian (No Ordinary Time) is a moving ode to her father and to their shared love of baseball. The word "recollections" in the subtitle rather than "reflections," say, is an apt designation of the book's content, which is charming and endearing, though does not allow access into the author's inner life. The baseball games of Goodwin's New York City youth are dramatically and beautifully narrated--it is refreshing to read about a girl's passion for the sport; her childhood love of the game and the three teams that played in the city in the 1950s is evident in every paragraph. But when Goodwin focuses on herself and her family apart from baseball--her mother was chronically ill and dies in the final pages of the book--she seems content to skim the surface of the story, with emotion held too deeply in check for what ought to have been the book's climax. Yet in the pages giving her childhood perspective on such things as race and the Army-McCarthy hearings, we behold the deep roots of this historian's success in her art. Photos not seen by PW.
Starred review from August 1, 1997
For Doris Kearns of Rockville Centre in Long Island, New York, religion--Roman Catholicism at the Gothic St. Agnes Church--was a given, but baseball in a region blessed with three outstanding teams was a choice. Unlike the Freidles next door and the local butchers, who supported the hated Yanks, the Kearns family chose the Dodgers with a passion that had six-year-old Doris keeping a detailed score book, which allowed her to describe every game to her bank-examiner father when he came home from work. The remarkable '50s in New York baseball, together with the rituals of her church and the universal preoccupations of childhood, lend structure to this involving memoir by the Pulitzer Prize^-winning author of "No Ordinary Time" (1994). As in her studies of the Roosevelts, Lyndon Johnson, and "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys," Goodwin superbly weaves together the universal and the particular: experiences she shared with millions of other war babies and boomers, and those unique to a specific place, time, and family. And what a great start for life as a historian: obsessively following da Bums from 1949 to 1958! ((Reviewed Aug. 1997))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1997, American Library Association.)
June 15, 1997
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author on how baseball brought her close to her father.