Play Ball! … At The Library With Julie Stern

It’s summertime, and that means it’s time to play ball … at the library.

Beginning Tuesday, June 16, Booth Library in conjunction with the Connecticut Humanities Council will host a three-part book discussion series featuring three books on America’s favorite past time: baseball. Julie Stern, who regularly leads book discussion programs for the library, will share her love of both the game and the books selected for the series.

The series will lead off with Wait Till Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin. The Pulitzer Prize winner (Team of Rivals, No Ordinary Time) has written a touching memoir of growing up in Brooklyn, as the daughter of an avid Brooklyn Dodgers fan and a book lover. Here is a book written from the perspective of a fan and yet it is so much more.

Baseball is not just a sport for Ms Goodwin. For her, it epitomizes a sense of community in Brooklyn, a source of childhood heroes and fantasies, her strong bond with her father, the difficulty of enduring loss, and the bliss of a win. Goodwin re-creates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between fans of the Dodgers, Giants, and Yankees.

Ms Goodwin also offers a child’s-eye view of the Cold War, from the lunacy of bomb shelters and “duck and cover” drills to a particularly disturbing memory of reenacting the McCarthy hearings with other neighborhood children. Readers meet the people who most influenced Ms Goodwin’s early life: her mother, who taught her the joy of books but whose debilitating illness left her housebound, and her father, who taught her the joy of baseball and to root for the Dodgers of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, and Pee Wee Reese.

Wait Till Next Year will be discussed on Tuesday, June 16, at 7:30 pm. Future discussions in the Play Ball Series include The Natural by Bernard Malamud on Tuesday, June 30, and Shoeless Joe on Tuesday, July 14.

Play Ball discussion leader Julie Stern teaches humanities at Western Connecticut State College and when she is not on the tennis court, hosting Grandma Camp, or at a ball game, she leads book discussions at C.H. Booth Library on authors both classic and contemporary. She also works with middle school students on the Art of Writing Mysteries. And with the remaining spare time she has, Mrs Stern helps with the Friends of Booth Library Book Sale.

In addition to the book discussions, the library will show some favorite baseball movies on Tuesdays at 2 and 7 pm: A League of Their Own on June 23, Bang the Drum Slowly on July 7, and Field of Dreams on July 21.

Carol Birch, a popular storyteller, will visit the library on Tuesday, July 28, at 2 pm, to perform a telling of The Lou Gehrig Story.

All of C.H. Booth Library’s programs are free but registration is requested. Call 426-4533 or visit CHBoothLibrary.