Word: goodwin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Inevitably, though, Goodwin's attachment to baseball came into conflict with her strict Catholic regimen, with a gravity that could only be a child's. Goodwin's recollection of her First Confession is perhaps the most endearing scene in the book. "I wished harm to Allie Reynolds [the Yankee pitcher]," she tells the priest. "Yes, I wished that Enos Slaughter of the Cards would break his ankle, that Phil Rizzuto of the Yanks would fracture a rib, and that Alvin Dark of the Giants would hurt his knee...I wished all these injuries would go away once the baseball season...
...Goodwin's tone is serious throughout: she treats her childish, five-year-old fears and reverence for Jackie Robinson with the same kind of gravity with which she later treats her perception of McCarthyism and the problems of adolescence. Bereft of landmarks that indicate change in maturity and voice, one never knows exactly how old Goodwin is at a given moment. On the other hand, growing up is indeed an invisible process--one is seldom conscious of growing older. Thus, the book's greatest problem is also that which lends it the most credibility...
...Says Goodwin of writing the book, "The greatest pleasure...came from finding these kids on my block. Someone remembered the sound of screen doors slamming--that was our signal that someone had come over--and someone else remembered the sound of honking horns after the Rosenberg execution...This made me realize how much needs to be remembered and how much can be remembered when people are prompted...
Going back to Rockville Centre prompted Goodwin herself to remember the most important details--a method of recollection she was not unfamiliar with: "When I was working with Lyndon Johnson on his memoirs, he lived in a house one mile away from the house he grew up in," she said. "We'd often walk the mile to that house, and the physical impact of being there really affected the memoir...Physical immediacy becomes so important...
...Goodwin explains in the book's introduction that she originally intended Wait Till Next Year to be the coming-of-age story of a Brooklyn Dodgers fan--a follow-up to her role in Ken Burns' documentary on baseball. Discovering her love for the Dodgers was inextricably entangled with her childhood as a whole, she realized that the story would have to take on a larger dimension. She set about the project, then, as any diligent historian would, collecting documents and photographing and contacting nearly everyone who lived in her neighborhood when she was a child. "My intention to write...