Gratuitous Llama Book Review

Mommy Knows Worst: Highlights from the Golden Age of Bad Parenting Advice, by James Lileks.

For those of you who haven't seen it yet, this is the Bleat-meister's foray into the awefulness of child-rearing advice, practices and products during the 30's, 40's and 50's. James takes for his text mostly advertisements from the period, together with a few government "How To" pamphlets, and graces the pages around them with the kind of snarkiness regular Bleat readers have come to enjoy. Everything from mothers cleaning their nipples with boric acid to bottle sterilization good enough for the Manhattan Project to Teaching Dad to Cope to scary car-seats o' death is covered.

While I read his column all the time, I've never read one of Lileks' books before. And it may be impudent of one of his self-proclaimed blog-children to say so, but it strikes me that there are some weaknesses here.

First of all, I think each chapter would have benefited enormously from having an introduction and conclusion, something to give the flavor of the Age and a little context. For example, James spends a lot of time mocking the fetish of the 40's and 50's with regular bowel movements, but never really offers an explanation as to why people were so obsessed - a few humorous words on the subject before he opens fire would be quite useful and entertaining. Similarly, the chapters all simply come to an abrupt end. It strikes me that one way to conclude each one would be a comparison of the follies of previous ages regarding a given topic with the ones that have replaced them. For example, James posts a number of ads for scary-looking toys that just have "Emergency Room" stamped all over them. It would be humorous to offer an example of the modern swing of the pendulum to the other extreme genereted by our collective hyper-concern for little Johnny's egg-shell skull. Buh'lieve me - for every neurotic phobia James captures from the Golden Age of Parenting, there is a modern equivalent just as gob-smackingly silly.

James also has a habit of wandering back and forth between mockery of content and mockery of form. This gets a bit distracting. Also, I think it's perhaps a leetle unfair to tease about, for example, lines coming out of a cartoon character's head to indicate strong emotion here, as this is a product of the artistic age, not of the subject of child-rearing in particular. Still, it is funny. Again, perhaps the best thing to do would have been to split the artwork critiques out into their own chapter or section.

Finally, there are one or two outliers that seem to serve no particular purpose whatsoever. I'm thinking of an illustrated ad for children's clothing from the 20's that appears toward the end of the book - it doesn't really go with anything else and seems to have been stuck in at random.

Having said all that, let me hasten to ad this: I was laughing so much over this book last evening that the Missus, who was also trying to read, coldly instructed me to go away and take my book with me.

So there you have it.

UPDATE: The Insta-Wife has a review at TechCentralStation that takes up the theme of modern child-rearing foibles in more depth.

UPDATE DEUX:

Speaking of modern parental train-wrecks:

"Do you have a kiss for Mommy?"