Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood

Greatest book i've read in a long time... (2010-08-31) : 5/5
I've probably purchased 25+ copies of this book now and I've been sending it to friends, relatives, and colleagues who have children, are having children, or who just might appreciate a good laugh about fatherhood. It's an easy read and very entertaining. But it also hits on a lot of the joy and angst father's feel before and after having children.
Men, Welcome to Reality (2010-08-09) : 5/5
Granted, this isn't Mr. Lewis' best work, but it's still darn entertaining. I found myself reading excerpts to my two, tween sons as well as my wife. There are plenty of laughs in this easy, short, self-deprecating read. It was very reassuring to read the same thoughts that ran through my head when my boys were infants. Mr. Lewis focuses on the first year of each of his three kids and what he was feeling during the ordeals. The memoir concludes with him having a vasectomy. It seemed a fitting end. If you are an involved father, you're life as you knew it before kids will only be a distant, fond memory. The author points out some of the rewards of caring for others, but mostly the book is a pity party. Any man who is or may someday be a father will get a reality check with this honest portrayal of fatherhood. The book will probably scare the bejesus out of a few men contemplating parenthood.
Finally a Dad's perspective on fatherhood (2010-08-09) : 5/5
I absolutely LOVED this book. It reminded me alot of Erma Bombeck in it's humor. I read Bill Cosby's FATHERHOOD book, and ejoyed that. I enjoyed this author's style of writing much more. If you know a Father who enjoys reading AND has a sense of humor, get him this book!
Even you have no experience with kids (2010-07-20) : 4/5
Michael Lewis is a good story teller. He makes exaggeration sound believable and sarcasms natural. It is actually the same old story: a you little bastard who tortures me, exploit me and never pay back or even say thank you but I still love you kind of story. The problems for him are nothing new, even for a 22 year college student who probably won't have anything to do with babies in 10 years and have never had a younger sibling or any babysitting experience. Yes, the baby cries; the baby swears; the baby gets sick. Don't they all do? Well, you took your kid gambling, big deal? My parents got me drunk when I was three and they found it joke. My dad put me on backseat of his bike when he was drunk and even better, he was riding on road with ice and snow. How does that sound? Vasectomy is not that a big deal either. He sounds like he never masturbates before. But the idea of doing that in a parking lot ever coming to his mind is quite astonishing. At the part, I think he tried to hard to be funny. Well, to conclude, nothing much new about the new parents' story, told in a humorous way, but trying to hard sometimes. But if you are parents, you probably will not find out. You all exaggerate, right?
YOU MEAN IT DOESN'T ALL COME NATURALLY? (2010-06-26) : 4/5
"The thing that most surprised me about fatherhood the first time around was how long it took before I felt about my child what I was expected to feel. Clutching Quinn after she exited the womb, I was able to generate tenderness and a bit of theoretical affection, but after that, for a good six weeks, the best I could manage was detached amusement. The worst was hatred." Now that's funny! -- hyperbolic, overstated perhaps, but really quite funny. Because in ways it is not polite to emphasize, it's right on the mark about how much at sea --and how harrassed at momemtns-- a new father can feel. It just isn't easy being a new father. The role isn't as defined (and it's nowhere as central as the mother's, and babies don't understand how much change they have brought to their parents' lives --they cry, need food, poop, need diapers changed, or need to be burped, or have colic or some unexplainable but absolutely terrifying ailment that goes away just about the time you get them to the doctor's. No parenting manual prepares one for parenthood. The poor father doesn't even have hormonal help to tide him over the hard first months.

Three-time new father Michael Lewis wrote this book inbetween his other books, the ones, as he writes, that paid the bills. Disregard the subtitle: this is not a guide for anything. Rather, it's a loose collection of occasional humorous essays written on the fly while distracted from his other writing (the bill-paying writing, mind you) by the demands of parenting. The essays originally appeared in Slate magazine and are collected under the headings, "Quinn", "Dixie" and "Walker," the names of his three children. Lewis's more outrageous comments may enrage the literal-minded reader, especially if she is a mother, but they're not false observations, just hyperbolically expressed.

Nor do they all deal with the newest born: Quinn and then Dixie have an interesting take on how to drive their parents nuts after the newborn arrives. Thus, Dixie (the middle child), anticipating Walker's birth: "Hardly a day has passed in months without melodramatic suffering. One afternoon I collected Dixie from her preschool ... and learned that she'd moped around the playground until a teacher finally asked her what was troubling her. 'When the baby comes, my parents won't love me as much,' she'd said. Asked where she'd gotten that idea from, she said, 'My big sister told me.'" Writes Lewis comment: "I've sometimes felt that we're using the wrong manual to fix an appliance--that say, we're trying to repair a washing machine with the instructions for the lawnmower.... A family is like a stereo system: A stereo system is only as good as its weakest component, and a family is onlys happy as its unhappiest member. Occasionally that is me; more often it is someone else; and so I must remain vigilant, lest the pleasure of my own life be dampened by their unhappiness."

This is a funny, not very deep book that will strike a chord in many fathers breasts, though they will strive manli(ly) to deny it.