Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir

This book ws recommended by former art professsor and friend Luke Balistreri. Hisemail to me referred to this novel as "charming," and so I found it to be. The novel is set, for the most part, in the 1940's and 50's. The author is born in 1943, and begins with that period of time. World War Two is soon to end. Women leave their factory and business jobs to begin the serious and appropriate job of being stay at home moms who support thier husbands, the real bread winners. After all, such is the mentality of the time. The author allows us the privilege of meeting the people in her life who make up her neighborhood and their community: the baker, the butcher, the pharmacist, the grocer, and the deli owner, for example. Sound boring? It is not. It is too sincere and real to be boring, a true slice of Americana. Thisstory imparts the feelings of the time: optimism and great faith in the motherland, the land of prosperity. Her father is a bank examiner, an Irish descendant who loves America and baseball. He instills that love of baseball in his impressionable young daughter. In fact, this is a story that is so entwined with the Dodges and the Giants that is is inseparable from the fabric of the novel and the author's own life. But it includes other goodies as well. There is her fasith in the Catholic church, her upbringing in its traditions, and how it affected her entire life and outlook; there is the ominous feel of the Cold War, and the endless atom bomb drills in readiness for the time Nikita Kruschev described as "a day the living will envy the dead."; McCarthyism, and the growing paranoia about communists. This is an interesting book that will take you back to a time that predates the flower children and VietnamWAr protests. But the writing for these events in on the graffiti-stained walls late in the 50's when the protagonist's peers are growing into citizens who see things a bit differently than their parents, adults who will not tolerate discrimination and wars without due cause. This book helps us see that we are all truly pawns in the game of history, a game that necessarily entails change. And not always change for the better. I gave this a ****Four star rating.