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3.49 AVERAGE
3.49 AVERAGE
Wow, this guy is dumber than his children's names, which is quite a feat ("Quinn Tallulah Lewis''? Seriously?).
I'm glad I didn't purchase this book. It's too slight and surfacey to be satisfying. I like Lewis' writing style (I read Moneyball twice back-to-back because it BLEW MY MIND with awesomeness), so it's especially frustrating that he couldn't, or wouldn't, delve deeper into some of the issues raised. It's a good fatherhood-related gift for someone you want to keep at arms' length.
Lightweight but with some good insights. Usual high standard of writing from Michael Lewis
a laugh out loud read about one man's journey through fatherhood. i did the audio book and that may have added a lot to it. the author read it himself and and his voices and inflections were hilarious.
Teaser: If you have a weak mind, are unable to turn off your "I am sooo offended brain cells", wear polyester shorts, have plastic on your furniture, and just can't bear to see a naughty word, skip this review.
Take 1: My wife and I are listening to this while driving up into Minnesota on vacation (mixed in with some of my favorite old Booknotes shows with Brian Lamb -- the guy is the best, bar none, interviewer around -- when she nods off.) She's not nodding off because of the book because it has had us laughing our heads off.
There are so many funny scenes, it's hard to pick a favorite, but I think the funniest was when, Dixie, his 3-year-old daughter runs to the defense of her 6 year-old sister who is being bothered by some older boys in the childrens' pool while Lewis is right next door in the adult wading area keeping an eye on things. "You teasing boys, you motherfucking assholes," she screams at them in his loudest voice, whereupon, the mother of one of the boys yells at her son for teaching bad words to the little girl. Lewis meanwhile, is imitating an alligator in the pool, only his eyes and ears showing. Not his kid. Priceless.
Another great episode is his camping outing with his older daughter at an amusement park where they serve a great meal for the kids, probably the only one any of the dad's had ever seen their kids eat without them whining or crying: hamburgers, chips, soda, and doughnuts. Of course, she wants her dad's sleeping bag and wants to exchange. Should be no problem except her's is 4 feet long. And it's necessary to wake dad up every 30 minutes to ask a question. And then the "fucking" birds start singing at 6 in the morning just as they drift off to sleep. Classic
Take 2 tomorrow. Finished the book shortly after leaving. If you have children, you will love this book. If not, too bad. Besides being quite funny, it has it very poignant moments. He makes a distinction between the almost instant bonding with the mother. Fathers bond more slowly, but he notes that you really never love someone until you have to care for it. The classic example was his newborn son, third child, who developed RSV (look it up) and had to spend time in the hospital to regain his strength to breath (it's a respiratory virus.) Lewis was finally so upset with the interruptions from staff to just check on his kid, waking him up and disturbing him that he barricaded the door, did the aspirations himself and checked the monitors. When a student doctor slipped in while he was in the bathroom, Lewis peremptorily threw him out. "Can't I just check him?" was the plaintive query. "No, get out." was Lewis' response. Great scene. His child got better faster too. \
I remember something happening with my daughter reminiscent of Lewis' experience. We found a book not long ago with "I hate Dad, he is so mean," carboned on the cover. My daughter, enamored of carbon paper had inadvertently permanently enshrined her feelings at that moment. Lewis' daughter did something similar, writing "Dad is so mean." But she forgot she had done it a week later.
Lots of fun to listen to with your spouse. Oh yes, the description of getting the vasectomy is classic too. As is the one where he thinks his daughter has reported to her teachers that Dad has a small penis. Very funny.
Take 1: My wife and I are listening to this while driving up into Minnesota on vacation (mixed in with some of my favorite old Booknotes shows with Brian Lamb -- the guy is the best, bar none, interviewer around -- when she nods off.) She's not nodding off because of the book because it has had us laughing our heads off.
There are so many funny scenes, it's hard to pick a favorite, but I think the funniest was when, Dixie, his 3-year-old daughter runs to the defense of her 6 year-old sister who is being bothered by some older boys in the childrens' pool while Lewis is right next door in the adult wading area keeping an eye on things. "You teasing boys, you motherfucking assholes," she screams at them in his loudest voice, whereupon, the mother of one of the boys yells at her son for teaching bad words to the little girl. Lewis meanwhile, is imitating an alligator in the pool, only his eyes and ears showing. Not his kid. Priceless.
Another great episode is his camping outing with his older daughter at an amusement park where they serve a great meal for the kids, probably the only one any of the dad's had ever seen their kids eat without them whining or crying: hamburgers, chips, soda, and doughnuts. Of course, she wants her dad's sleeping bag and wants to exchange. Should be no problem except her's is 4 feet long. And it's necessary to wake dad up every 30 minutes to ask a question. And then the "fucking" birds start singing at 6 in the morning just as they drift off to sleep. Classic
Take 2 tomorrow. Finished the book shortly after leaving. If you have children, you will love this book. If not, too bad. Besides being quite funny, it has it very poignant moments. He makes a distinction between the almost instant bonding with the mother. Fathers bond more slowly, but he notes that you really never love someone until you have to care for it. The classic example was his newborn son, third child, who developed RSV (look it up) and had to spend time in the hospital to regain his strength to breath (it's a respiratory virus.) Lewis was finally so upset with the interruptions from staff to just check on his kid, waking him up and disturbing him that he barricaded the door, did the aspirations himself and checked the monitors. When a student doctor slipped in while he was in the bathroom, Lewis peremptorily threw him out. "Can't I just check him?" was the plaintive query. "No, get out." was Lewis' response. Great scene. His child got better faster too. \
I remember something happening with my daughter reminiscent of Lewis' experience. We found a book not long ago with "I hate Dad, he is so mean," carboned on the cover. My daughter, enamored of carbon paper had inadvertently permanently enshrined her feelings at that moment. Lewis' daughter did something similar, writing "Dad is so mean." But she forgot she had done it a week later.
Lots of fun to listen to with your spouse. Oh yes, the description of getting the vasectomy is classic too. As is the one where he thinks his daughter has reported to her teachers that Dad has a small penis. Very funny.
It's kind of interesting that two excellent Berkeley-based writers named Michael both happened to come out with a book of ruminations on modern fatherhood (and its corollary, manhood) within a few months of each other. Since we added a second child to our own household a few months ago, and I'm now on (unpaid) leave to take care of him for a few months, this struck me as a good time to check out what two writers I greatly respect have to say on my current profession. (The other book is Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs). To a certain extent, both authors grapple with the state that Lewis articles in his introduction: "Obviously, we're in the midst of some long unhappy transition between the model of fatherhood as practiced by my father and some ideal model."
Unfortunately, Lewis has set such a high bar with his past books (Liar's Poker, Moneyball, and The Blind Side), that this loosely assembled patchwork of journal entries and Slate.com essays ends up being a total disappointment. It's kind of stunning to me that someone with his powers of both analysis and storytelling managed to say absolutely nothing interesting, provocative, or even amusing about being a father in this new age of fatherhood. Instead, he paints himself in the usual self-deprecating colors of progressive fatherhood -- ever the bumbling idiot, an object of dismissive scorn by his partner, etc. Almost every situation reads like a story one's already heard before, and his ambivalence about fatherhood will be familiar to, um, pretty much any male reader who's had a kid in the last ten years or so.
I guess some people might find this "frank" male perspective enlightening or refreshing, but as a fellow guy, I was mainly bored. Maybe I'm the wrong audience for this book -- after all, I was a stay-at-home dad for about ten months with our first child. It may be that his incredibly minor trials and tribulations end up sounding kind of whiny. Ultimately, I wish he could have found a fresh angle to take on the topic of parenting. For example, he knows a lot about incentives, he could have examined his own parenting through the lens of incentives (and arrived at a better version of the book Parentonomics). Or, as in Moneyball, he could have taken a look at the historically dominant paradigm of contemporary fathering and examined why that's undergone a dramatic shift in certain demographics (such as his) over the last ten years or so.
Like I said, I really like Michael Lewis' past books, but this one is a dud. Skip it and try out Michael Chabon's much funnier, provocative, and more emotionally compelling Manhood for Amateurs instead.
Unfortunately, Lewis has set such a high bar with his past books (Liar's Poker, Moneyball, and The Blind Side), that this loosely assembled patchwork of journal entries and Slate.com essays ends up being a total disappointment. It's kind of stunning to me that someone with his powers of both analysis and storytelling managed to say absolutely nothing interesting, provocative, or even amusing about being a father in this new age of fatherhood. Instead, he paints himself in the usual self-deprecating colors of progressive fatherhood -- ever the bumbling idiot, an object of dismissive scorn by his partner, etc. Almost every situation reads like a story one's already heard before, and his ambivalence about fatherhood will be familiar to, um, pretty much any male reader who's had a kid in the last ten years or so.
I guess some people might find this "frank" male perspective enlightening or refreshing, but as a fellow guy, I was mainly bored. Maybe I'm the wrong audience for this book -- after all, I was a stay-at-home dad for about ten months with our first child. It may be that his incredibly minor trials and tribulations end up sounding kind of whiny. Ultimately, I wish he could have found a fresh angle to take on the topic of parenting. For example, he knows a lot about incentives, he could have examined his own parenting through the lens of incentives (and arrived at a better version of the book Parentonomics). Or, as in Moneyball, he could have taken a look at the historically dominant paradigm of contemporary fathering and examined why that's undergone a dramatic shift in certain demographics (such as his) over the last ten years or so.
Like I said, I really like Michael Lewis' past books, but this one is a dud. Skip it and try out Michael Chabon's much funnier, provocative, and more emotionally compelling Manhood for Amateurs instead.
Mildly entertaining but too much in the vein of 'bumbling sitcom dad and shrewish wife' for my taste.
+10 points for the part where someone tells him she loved his essays about his son in the Luxembourg Gardens and I thought "no, that was Adam Gopnik," just as he says "no, that was Adam Gopnik." Possibly I have read too much in the sub-sub-genre of nonfiction about raising children in Paris.
+10 points for the part where someone tells him she loved his essays about his son in the Luxembourg Gardens and I thought "no, that was Adam Gopnik," just as he says "no, that was Adam Gopnik." Possibly I have read too much in the sub-sub-genre of nonfiction about raising children in Paris.