Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
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Women’s Work Maybe someday there won’t be a genre of women in business books. Maybe someday the experiences of women in the business world won’t be all that different from men’s experiences. For now, though, the shelves groan with women’s biz books that tellingly share one characteristic: They all deal with women’s struggles to triumph over obstacles strewn into their financial and career paths by human biology, corporate tradition, and, of course, men. This month, we look at four new releases in this still-rich vein.

Anne E. Francis probes an especially thorny phenomenon in The Daughter Also Rises: How Women Overcome Obstacles and Advance in the Family-Owned Business (Rudi Publishing, $16.95, 0945213387). This is not a book of caricature. It shows, among other truths, that Dad does not have to be Archie Bunker to stand in the way of his little girl’s success at the family company. In fact, sometimes a father’s (or mother’s) best intentions may be just the problem, trapping the adult daughter in a childlike workplace dependency.

Francis, a business consultant with a doctorate in social work, draws on her experience of counseling families on the broad spectrum of issues business and (often deeply) personal that arise when blood and business mix. Through cogent, real-world examples and incisive analysis, she sheds light on topics that might seem unfathomable and might seem unrelated to the running of a business. It turns out, for instance, that a mother’s repressed envy of her daughter’s success, and a father’s unspoken discomfort in the presence of his adolescent daughter long ago, can have plenty to do with business when families work together.

The author’s language is refreshingly free of psychobabble, taking on daunting psychological subject matter with admirable clarity. For ambitious women and the people who love them, The Daughter Also Rises offers a roadmap to uncharted territory.

It has been argued before that women have their own way of doing business, distinct from the structures of traditional, male-dominated corporate life. Bearing out that argument are many of the extraordinary life stories sketched out in Conversations with Uncommon Women: Insights from Women Who’ve Risen Above Life’s Challenges to Achieve Extraordinary Success (Amacom, $22.95, 0814405207), by Ellie Wymard.

Of the 100 women we meet here, some are famous (former Texas Governor Ann Richards, syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman, Ruth Fertel of Ruth’s Chris Steak House), others lesser-known. But they’re all in business, whether the business is working behind the scenes in a political campaign or running an arts organization or starting a small business on the kitchen table.

As Wymard’s women stretch the bounds of what we normally think of as business, they puncture stereotypes along the way. There’s a surprise on nearly every page. When we meet Mary Agee, who gained brief and unwanted fame some years ago as the female executive whose romantic involvement with the CEO led to chaos at Bendix Corp., we don’t read some Oprah story of how she has personally grown from the experience. What Mary Agee does these days is not about Mary Agee; it’s about making a difference in the lives of troubled women. Productively, without fanfare and without taking sides in the abortion debate, the foundation she runs helps women cope with unexpected pregnancies.

Wymard vividly sketches the turning points in many of these women’s lives. In one portrait, for instance, we see successful ad exec Kip Tiernan stopped dead in her tracks in a church aisle, suddenly uttering Holy something (not a word one says in church): It’s not a prayer; it’s an epiphany, after which she is destined to spend the rest of her life as a gadfly activist on behalf of Boston’s homeless.

The author also offers trenchant insights on how women run organizations. One female CEO tells Wymard she wishes she could be tougher on some employees, but senses that she is expected to have a more collaborative style of management because of her gender. People think I’m nice, this executive says, and I’m not sure that’s true. They don’t give me any choice! Kathleen Neville’s Internal Affairs: The Abuse of Power, Sexual Harassment, and Hypocrisy in the Workplace (McGraw-Hill, $24.95, 0071342567) takes us to a darker corner of the working world. It’s a little hard to believe that a book like this needed to be written, almost a decade after the nationwide sexual-harassment-sensitivity stand-down brought on by the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings. Yet here we are on the cusp of a new millennium, and women can’t be assured they won’t be accosted by a creep while they work. Nor that the creep won’t be the boss.

Neville, an educator, arbitrator, and expert on sexual harassment, has spent a lot of time getting inside the heads of victims, harassers, corporate officials, and others affected by harassment cases. Her horror stories of actual cases drive home a point that won’t be lost on senior managers who think it can’t happen in my shop it can happen, no matter how much camaraderie your employees seem to enjoy, no matter how upstanding a guy your scoutmaster-father-of-three-EVP-for-marketing may seem to be, no matter what boilerplate language you have put in your employee handbook about your supposedly zero-tolerance policy on workplace harassment.

Equally valuable are the detailed composite scenarios that Neville presents in order to explain the varying moral and social perspectives that come into play in harassment cases. The book is like a series of role-playing exercises, inviting readers to see things, just briefly, from the point of view of the board of directors (who may consider it more cost-effective to pay off claims than to lose a valued top exec); the competing lawyers (who tend to spring unwelcome surprises on both adversaries and clients in the course of the settlement process); the victim (often tormented by self-doubt about the incidents); and the harasser (who may be a calculating predator in the corner office or may be Lennie from the mail room, who figures the girls upstairs appreciate being told they’re kinda hot).

In these scenarios, the author does not address the possibility of false harassment claims by vindictive employees. (It would be interesting to know whether that omission reflects a partisan stance on her part or the fact that, in her experience, such claims simply don’t happen.) Still, Neville sheds light where there has mostly been heat in the past, moving beyond battle-of-the-sexes polemics to convey real understanding about how sexual harassment happens and how companies can prevent it. Internal Affairs is a comprehensive and eye-opening primer on a subject that today’s corporate honchos wish away at their peril.

Enough about women at work what’s a lady to do with her hard-earned dough? For starters, don’t let some piggish man get his mitts on it. Heidi Evans offers that advice in How to Hide Money from Your Husband . . . and Other Time-Honored Ways to Build a Nest Egg: The Best Kept Secret of a Good Marriage. This is an unabashedly one-sided book. Evans says men are past masters at hiding money from women, whether the purpose is to finance secret affairs or to keep a wife from getting part of the marital estate in a divorce. It’s high time, she argues, that women play the same game.

More intriguingly, Evans finds that women have been hiding money from their husbands since time immemorial. A more than adequate amateur anthropologist, she delves into the unrecorded history of women’s home lives, uncovering stories of women who spent lifetimes building secret, five-figure nest eggs. Some wives do it to protect themselves in shaky marriages. Others do it to protect the feckless men they love from their own bad habits.

The book presents plenty of cautionary tales about women who trusted their cheating husbands too much or too long, until divorce brought financial ruin. There are stories of depressingly mercenary men as well as women. But the most interesting relationships chronicled here are the ones in which a little financial secrecy really has been the key to a strong marriage, enabling the woman to feel a measure of control over her life and providing a slush fund from which the whole family benefits. How to Hide Money is an eye-opening look at how money and power are intertwined in a marriage, and how women can hold onto their share of both.

Briefly noted: Even in today’s booming economy, shocking numbers of Americans still carry crippling credit-card balances and other installment debts that can leave them feeling financially trapped. Slash Your Debt: Save Money and Secure Your Future (Financial Literacy Center, $10.95, 0965963837), by debt counselor Gerri Detweiler and writers Marc Eisenson and Nancy Castleman, offers a concise and understandable roadmap for getting out of the money pit.

In Generations at Work: Managing the Clash of Veterans, Boomers, Xers, and Nexters in Your Workplace (Amacom, $25, 0814404804), authors Ron Zemke, Claire Raines, and Bob Filipczak address the conflicting generational values to be found in any large group of employees. And they look to the future, predicting that today’s adolescent Nexters will come full circle, tending to share more values in common with their 60-to-80-year-old Veteran elders than with any social cohorts in-between.

Journalist E. Thomas Wood is an editor with the Champs-Elysees.com family of European language-and-culture magazines.

Women's Work Maybe someday there won't be a genre of women in business books. Maybe someday the experiences of women in the business world won't be all that different from men's experiences. For now, though, the shelves groan with women's biz books that tellingly share…

Review by

The eyes have it Mother’s birthday? Nephew’s graduation? Second cousin twice removed’s wedding? If you need help selecting a gift for any occasion, you’ve come to the right place. What gift is always the right color, the right size, and the right price? Why, books, of course! Do you know someone who is so trendy that when they go shopping, they think their clothes are out of style before they can get them to the cash register? Laugh and learn with Holly Brubach’s A Dedicated Follower of Fashion (Phaidon, $29.95, 071483887X). A collection of 27 essays published during the past two decades, Brubach’s writings offer insight on trends, designers, models, and photographers. There are chapters dedicated to men, shoes, visionaries, and plus-sizes. Luckily, the photographs featured were carefully selected, so some of fashion’s . . . er, more outrageous phases are kept within the text. It is a witty, educated observation that isn’t muddled into tedium or grandiosity. Brubach takes a scenic route from Paris to New York, with plenty of stops along the way.

One hundred and five years ago, a subtitle reading An Illustrated Monthly was added to the masthead of National Geographic. Since then, photographs featured in the magazine have told stories that reflect our world and the times in which we live. Beginning with those early photographs, six authors have compiled an era-by-era account of the 20th century in National Geographic Photographs: The Milestones. Often working in rigorous or rudimentary settings, many of the photographers featured are true pioneers of photojournalism. Look on the wedding portrait of a late 19th-century Zulu couple; observe the conditions of an early 20th-century Mexican cigarette factory; visit Lappland, New York, the Arctic, and scores of other places and events that were hallmarks of the past century. Very often, photographers would return to a previous site with mixed results; progress is evident in many of these revisits, while other photographs reflect areas that remain untouched by time.

If breathtaking scenery and colorful history excites someone on your gift list, you can’t do much better than Scotland. Checkmark Books has captured the majesty and mystery of this gorgeous country in Heritage of Scotland: A Cultural History of Scotland and Its People ($29.95, 06003552609). Author Nathaniel Harris’s enormous undertaking covers everything from Scotland’s landscape to its literary offerings. Beautiful artwork and photographs are featured alongside an abundance of information about Scottish people and their traditions. And yes, clans, kilts, and bagpipes are included, but readers will soon discover there is so much more! Visit the Highland Games, look at priceless works of art, learn the complex linguistic history of the Scottish people, observe the country’s most famous structures, many dating back to prehistoric times. Heritage of Scotland is a great item for history buffs and anyone with Scottish roots.

It’s a classic dilemma: You’re standing in the video store, thinking, What’s that movie from the 1940s, the one where John Wayne plays a naval officer and has an affair with a nurse, played by Donna Reed? This dilemma is easily resolved with VideoHound’s War Movies: Classic Conflict on Film (Visible Ink, $19.95, 1578590892). Mike Mayo has compiled and arranged over 200 war movies according to the war depicted. This guide includes many documentaries and overlooked films, like The Fighting Sullivans and Come and See. There are sidebars profiling famous actors, listings of full movie credits, and 200 photographs to peruse. Mayo provides commentary and synopsis for each film, mentioning the controversies and histories surrounding some of Hollywood’s most powerful movies. Amid trivia and quotes, Mayo is kind enough to include a See Also section for each film, for moviewatchers who are interested in other films that are similar in content, direction, or have the same stars . . . just in case your first choice has been rented out!

The eyes have it Mother's birthday? Nephew's graduation? Second cousin twice removed's wedding? If you need help selecting a gift for any occasion, you've come to the right place. What gift is always the right color, the right size, and the right price? Why, books,…

Review by

Gifts for Black History Month Revisiting an era that rent the nation, King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. is the perfect way for readers to commemorate Black History Month. The first of its kind and a wonderful gift book, King is an intimate look at the life of a multifaceted figure. Told in graphic black and white, King’s story unfolds in a series of photographs, some of which have never been seen before, and the result is a visual retrospective almost as mighty as the man himself.

Photographer Bob Adelman assembled the starkly beautiful, sobering images that comprise this volume, and it’s a detailed compilation that spans more than a decade. With authoritative text written by National Book Award winner Charles Johnson, this in-depth look at one of our most revered leaders is organized around the major events in King’s life, from the 1957 prayer pilgrimage in Washington, D.

C., to the Nobel Prize award ceremony in Oslo in 1964. But most touching are the simple moments in which the great man seems mortal: King dozing in a chair in an airport; struggling over the composition of a sermon; having a strained moment at home with his wife Coretta. While documenting the life of King, the book also captures the essence of a violent epoch, presenting the triumphs and trials that characterized the civil rights movement and doing so with an intensity that makes the events of the ’50s and ’60s feel strangely immediate. Most importantly, King penetrates the surface of its subject, presenting both the public and the private sides of an icon, a superman of sorts who was, after all, human.

Black history is at the reader’s fingertips with Velma Maia Thomas’ ingenious three-dimensional book Freedom’s Children: The Passage from Emancipation to the Great Migration. The second volume in a series chronicling black history and the sequel to Thomas’ best-selling Lest We Forget, Freedom’s Children addresses the years following the Civil War, examining the challenges faced by slaves tasting liberty for the first time. With illustrations, photographs and one-of-a-kind interactive elements, this intriguing book requires reader participation. A letter from a Freedmen’s Bureau agent is tucked into an envelope. A miniature version of The Freedmen’s Third Reader a primer studied by illiterate slaves invites perusal. A ticket for the Colorado and Southern Railway, which bore freedmen and freedwomen west in search of better lives, and script money folded into pockets lend an air of authenticity to Thomas’ narrative, making Freedom’s Children something of a fold-out museum, a mini-archive. Thomas’ illuminating text, which follows the lives of former slaves, along with the replicas of documents and artifacts that illustrate the era, make Freedom’s Children both an invaluable work of scholarship and a beautiful gift volume.

A book that delivers the nobility, beauty and dignity of the world’s most mysterious continent, Sensual Africa by photographer Joe Wuerfel captures the essence of a place and its people in pictures that are sheer poetry. Wuerfel visited the Cape Verde Islands, Tanzania and Namibia, where he lived among a nomadic tribe of herdsmen called the Himba, and the results are images tempered by a golden tint, photographs that have the warm haze of yellowed lace, of something aged. Dressed in calfskin loincloths and beaded belts, the bodies of the Himba seem burnished. At times, in this light, Africa itself appears apocalyptic a landscape yellow-white, barren and bone-dry in which zebras look otherworldly, and black baobab trees stand like supplicants beneath an unyielding sky. In his travels through Africa, Wuerfel captured archetypal images of the masculine and the feminine, of youth and age. Young Himba girls flirty yet demure seem to be sharing a secret; Tanzanian women mourn, their heads shaven in honor of the dead; a bare-chested Himba boy runs with a bow and arrow. Foreign yet familiar, the postures of these isolated people transcend language and culture and remind us of what it means to be human. In their gestures, we can see ourselves.

An interview with photographer Peter Beard, who has spent 25 years on the continent, is also included in Sensual Africa. A remarkable visual experience, this is a stunning volume that Africaphiles will love.

Gifts for Black History Month Revisiting an era that rent the nation, King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. is the perfect way for readers to commemorate Black History Month. The first of its kind and a wonderful gift book, King is an intimate…

Review by

The eyes have it Mother’s birthday? Nephew’s graduation? Second cousin twice removed’s wedding? If you need help selecting a gift for any occasion, you’ve come to the right place. What gift is always the right color, the right size, and the right price? Why, books, of course! Do you know someone who is so trendy that when they go shopping, they think their clothes are out of style before they can get them to the cash register? Laugh and learn with Holly Brubach’s A Dedicated Follower of Fashion. A collection of 27 essays published during the past two decades, Brubach’s writings offer insight on trends, designers, models, and photographers. There are chapters dedicated to men, shoes, visionaries, and plus-sizes. Luckily, the photographs featured were carefully selected, so some of fashion’s . . . er, more outrageous phases are kept within the text. It is a witty, educated observation that isn’t muddled into tedium or grandiosity. Brubach takes a scenic route from Paris to New York, with plenty of stops along the way.

One hundred and five years ago, a subtitle reading An Illustrated Monthly was added to the masthead of National Geographic. Since then, photographs featured in the magazine have told stories that reflect our world and the times in which we live. Beginning with those early photographs, six authors have compiled an era-by-era account of the 20th century in National Geographic Photographs: The Milestones (National Geographic Society, $50, 0792275209). Often working in rigorous or rudimentary settings, many of the photographers featured are true pioneers of photojournalism. Look on the wedding portrait of a late 19th-century Zulu couple; observe the conditions of an early 20th-century Mexican cigarette factory; visit Lappland, New York, the Arctic, and scores of other places and events that were hallmarks of the past century. Very often, photographers would return to a previous site with mixed results; progress is evident in many of these revisits, while other photographs reflect areas that remain untouched by time.

If breathtaking scenery and colorful history excites someone on your gift list, you can’t do much better than Scotland. Checkmark Books has captured the majesty and mystery of this gorgeous country in Heritage of Scotland: A Cultural History of Scotland and Its People ($29.95, 06003552609). Author Nathaniel Harris’s enormous undertaking covers everything from Scotland’s landscape to its literary offerings. Beautiful artwork and photographs are featured alongside an abundance of information about Scottish people and their traditions. And yes, clans, kilts, and bagpipes are included, but readers will soon discover there is so much more! Visit the Highland Games, look at priceless works of art, learn the complex linguistic history of the Scottish people, observe the country’s most famous structures, many dating back to prehistoric times. Heritage of Scotland is a great item for history buffs and anyone with Scottish roots.

It’s a classic dilemma: You’re standing in the video store, thinking, What’s that movie from the 1940s, the one where John Wayne plays a naval officer and has an affair with a nurse, played by Donna Reed? This dilemma is easily resolved with VideoHound’s War Movies: Classic Conflict on Film (Visible Ink, $19.95, 1578590892). Mike Mayo has compiled and arranged over 200 war movies according to the war depicted. This guide includes many documentaries and overlooked films, like The Fighting Sullivans and Come and See. There are sidebars profiling famous actors, listings of full movie credits, and 200 photographs to peruse. Mayo provides commentary and synopsis for each film, mentioning the controversies and histories surrounding some of Hollywood’s most powerful movies. Amid trivia and quotes, Mayo is kind enough to include a See Also section for each film, for moviewatchers who are interested in other films that are similar in content, direction, or have the same stars . . . just in case your first choice has been rented out!

The eyes have it Mother's birthday? Nephew's graduation? Second cousin twice removed's wedding? If you need help selecting a gift for any occasion, you've come to the right place. What gift is always the right color, the right size, and the right price? Why, books,…

Jody Rosen’s love of bikes shines through in this amusing, unconventional history of the bicycle as a great cultural disrupter.
Review by

Gifts for Black History Month Revisiting an era that rent the nation, King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. is the perfect way for readers to commemorate Black History Month. The first of its kind and a wonderful gift book, King is an intimate look at the life of a multifaceted figure. Told in graphic black and white, King’s story unfolds in a series of photographs, some of which have never been seen before, and the result is a visual retrospective almost as mighty as the man himself.

Photographer Bob Adelman assembled the starkly beautiful, sobering images that comprise this volume, and it’s a detailed compilation that spans more than a decade. With authoritative text written by National Book Award winner Charles Johnson, this in-depth look at one of our most revered leaders is organized around the major events in King’s life, from the 1957 prayer pilgrimage in Washington, D.C., to the Nobel Prize award ceremony in Oslo in 1964. But most touching are the simple moments in which the great man seems mortal: King dozing in a chair in an airport; struggling over the composition of a sermon; having a strained moment at home with his wife Coretta. While documenting the life of King, the book also captures the essence of a violent epoch, presenting the triumphs and trials that characterized the civil rights movement and doing so with an intensity that makes the events of the ’50s and ’60s feel strangely immediate. Most importantly, King penetrates the surface of its subject, presenting both the public and the private sides of an icon, a superman of sorts who was, after all, human.

Black history is at the reader’s fingertips with Velma Maia Thomas’ ingenious three-dimensional book Freedom’s Children: The Passage from Emancipation to the Great Migration . The second volume in a series chronicling black history and the sequel to Thomas’ best-selling Lest We Forget, Freedom’s Children addresses the years following the Civil War, examining the challenges faced by slaves tasting liberty for the first time. With illustrations, photographs and one-of-a-kind interactive elements, this intriguing book requires reader participation. A letter from a Freedmen’s Bureau agent is tucked into an envelope. A miniature version of The Freedmen’s Third Reader a primer studied by illiterate slaves invites perusal. A ticket for the Colorado and Southern Railway, which bore freedmen and freedwomen west in search of better lives, and script money folded into pockets lend an air of authenticity to Thomas’ narrative, making Freedom’s Children something of a fold-out museum, a mini-archive. Thomas’ illuminating text, which follows the lives of former slaves, along with the replicas of documents and artifacts that illustrate the era, make Freedom’s Children both an invaluable work of scholarship and a beautiful gift volume.

A book that delivers the nobility, beauty and dignity of the world’s most mysterious continent, Sensual Africa by photographer Joe Wuerfel captures the essence of a place and its people in pictures that are sheer poetry. Wuerfel visited the Cape Verde Islands, Tanzania and Namibia, where he lived among a nomadic tribe of herdsmen called the Himba, and the results are images tempered by a golden tint, photographs that have the warm haze of yellowed lace, of something aged. Dressed in calfskin loincloths and beaded belts, the bodies of the Himba seem burnished. At times, in this light, Africa itself appears apocalyptic a landscape yellow-white, barren and bone-dry in which zebras look otherworldly, and black baobab trees stand like supplicants beneath an unyielding sky. In his travels through Africa, Wuerfel captured archetypal images of the masculine and the feminine, of youth and age. Young Himba girls flirty yet demure seem to be sharing a secret; Tanzanian women mourn, their heads shaven in honor of the dead; a bare-chested Himba boy runs with a bow and arrow. Foreign yet familiar, the postures of these isolated people transcend language and culture and remind us of what it means to be human. In their gestures, we can see ourselves.

An interview with photographer Peter Beard, who has spent 25 years on the continent, is also included in Sensual Africa. A remarkable visual experience, this is a stunning volume that Africaphiles will love.

Gifts for Black History Month Revisiting an era that rent the nation, King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. is the perfect way for readers to commemorate Black History Month. The first of its kind and a wonderful gift book, King is an intimate…

Review by

One of my favorite characters in fiction is the Storekeeper in Phil Stong’s 1932 novel, State Fair. The Storekeeper is a cautious, skeptical fellow who believes that “Heaven ordains all things for the worst but more mischievously than tragically.” So don’t get too cocky: Don’t take the chains off your tires (it’s 1932 rural America, remember) just because it’s spring. Heaven may have plenty of mud in store and definitely will if you do take them off.

I’ve probably spent too much of my allotted span reading second and third-rate fiction, but I thought of the Storekeeper while reading Calvin Trillin’s Family Man. In these ruminations/memoirs about family life, Trillin holds, perhaps only half-jocularly, to a similar belief, the Evil Eye: “People who treat the Evil Eye with some respect can tell you that anyone handing out advice about family and thus implying that he and his family are so blessed, so close to perfection that it behooves them to share with others the secret of their success is asking for trouble.” Trillin skirts trouble with humor and dispenses only one really solid bit of advice to prospective parents: “Try to get one that doesn’t spit up.” Beyond that, he says, “your children are either the center of your life or they’re not, and the rest is commentary.” The rest is indeed commentary on the obvious fact that his two daughters, Abigail and Sarah, have been the center of his and his wife Alice’s life and exceedingly funny commentary it is. Though this book will be enjoyed by anyone who appreciates humor above the level of the hotfoot (not such a huge crowd, at that, in Adam Sandler’s America), it will be especially appreciated by anyone who happens to share Trillin’s prejudices and outlook.

For instance, in commenting on his family’s viewing and marching in the free-form, amateurish Halloween parades in their neighborhood of Greenwich Village, he says, “My interest in parades is usually limited by my failure to appreciate floats,” which rigidly separate paraders and spectators.

Exactly! Why, with such an attitude, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear him say that clowns are not funny. He doesn’t, but he comes close in disparaging most children’s theater, in which “children would shrink into the corner of their seats as foolishly dressed people on-stage favored them with stupid pratfalls or double entendres that would make ,musicals, like Pippin and West Side Story, that trigger both laughs and a child’s sense of awe.

Though he might not be charmed by the comparison, as a humorist Trillin is a lot like H. Allen Smith, of blessed memory and such titles as Low Man on a Totem Pole. His approach, it might be said, is one thing leads to another. A chapter that starts out discussing changes in wedding conventions leads to the time he didn’t have a spare hand with which to comfort his wife in the delivery room because one hand was holding the wallet he was advised not to leave in the locker while the other was holding up the scrub pants with played-out elastic he was given to wear.

Throughout, there is a noticeable strain of the amusing old duffer (even when younger) whom the daughters have to keep in line, of every sitcom sappy pappy from Chester A. Riley to Archie Bunker. But then, he admits that he tends toward the sitcom tone of voice when writing about domestic matters.

Behind it, though, is a definite bedrock of sophisticated common sense, revealed in the remark that both he and Alice “had upbringings whose essential squareness we valued.” It’s no accident that their daughters, though born in that era, did not end up with names like Moon Unit.

Though Trillin has lived all his adult life in New York City, “Alice and I both found something off-putting in New York kids we heard about who seemed not just overprivileged but oversavvy,” and so from time to time they would take the girls “back home” for a “booster shot” of his native Kansas City, which he concedes has never left him.

Because, he writes, “I believe that the only time parents are absolutely relaxed about the safety and well-being of their child, of any age, is when that child is under the parents’ own roof, fast asleep.” That’s one truism that all parents whose children are the center of their life can say “amen” to, regardless of the state of their sense of humor. Reviewed by Roger Miller.

One of my favorite characters in fiction is the Storekeeper in Phil Stong's 1932 novel, State Fair. The Storekeeper is a cautious, skeptical fellow who believes that "Heaven ordains all things for the worst but more mischievously than tragically." So don't get too cocky: Don't…

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