Daddy Needs a Drink
An Irreverent Look at Parenting from a Dad Who Truly Loves His Kids— Even When They're Driving Him Nuts
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- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
- دیدگاه کاربران
نقد و بررسی
April 3, 2006
Though he entering an already crowded field of pithy family essayists, Wilder's first book still resonates as an idiosyncratic charmer, avoiding the easy jokes for more carefully calculated wit. The familiar perils of parenthood-diaper changing, sleepless nights, inappropriate early words-are enumerated with an easygoing prose style that is consistently clever without ever trying too hard. Wilder is at his best when he ventures slightly farther afield from the standard set-pieces of the genre, such as in the show-stopping piece "Blood on the Tracks," in which he attends a music class for his son taught by a psychotic woman named Judith. Wilder perfectly conveys the nightmarish situation, recalling with escalating anxiety the rhyming couplets in which the teacher sings all of her instructions ("Repeating notes in such location / Is called proper audiation").. Unfortunately, the collection of 33 essays can get repetitive, and also suffers from the disjointed chronology that sometimes plagues works such as these. Nevertheless, Wilder deserves praise for his humor-especially his deadpan and appropriately dispatched profanity-as well as for the well rendered portraits of his worrying wife Lala and his two children.
April 15, 2006
This compilation feels like a compendium of rejects from Wilder's hum)or column for the "Santa Fe Reporter"; it's a snide commentary on fathering two young children that masks parental indolence with humor. Breezy but shallow, the essays quickly grow tiresome. On the prospect of growing from two children to three, for example, Wilder writes, -Why go to zone defense when you can survive just fine with man-to-man? - Bill Cosby's body of work and Tim Bete's "In The Beginning...There Were No Diapers: Laughing and Learning in the First Years of Fatherhood "have shown that it's possible to poke fun at fatherhood, but Wilder's effort feels particularly undignified. It's hard to be simultaneously snarky and decent, and here his leanings toward the former win out. While the book paints a vivid portrait of paternal love, it also shows a dad who's not trying very hard as a parent. Not recommended." - Douglas C. Lord, Connecticut State Lib., Middletown"
Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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