Babyhood - Hardcover

Reiser, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688149790 ISBN 13: 9780688149796

Publisher: William Morrow, 1997

Synopsis

The classic New York Times bestseller from actor/comedian Paul Reiser, a book that the San Francisco Chronicle calls “an out-loud laugh on every page,” is now available in trade paperback for the very first time. For fans of Reiser’s long-running sitcom Mad About You, with Helen Hunt and Hank Azaria, for readers of comic memoirs like Tina Fey’s Bossypants, and “for the couple considering parenthood as well as for parents who are decades past their days of diaper changing...this book hits home and hits the funnybone" (Chicago Tribune).

About this title

Review:

Fans of television's Mad About You and its star, Paul Reiser, will be delighted with his second foray into the self-deprecating self-help genre. Couplehood, his first book, leads logically to this next phase--Babyhood. In a chatty voice Reiser takes us from the "Maybe someday we'll have kids" step into the deep-sea dive of commitment.

Babyhood begins on an airplane, with Paul and wife blissfully unencumbered by children. They are seated across from the young parents (graying before his eyes) of a terrorizing 2-year-old and a screeching infant. This sobering reality manages magically to pale in a transcendent moment of the baby's bliss, uncomplicated by drool or colic, and the two decide: "Now."

Well, more or less now. First they try to get pregnant, making expeditions to the bookstore to case out the shelves of baby books; then there are the bouncy reflections on who is, after all, cut out to parent ("I don't know if, for example, Mozart actually had kids, but certainly there is no record of him ever leaving the office early to coach Peewee Soccer League"). Later comes the account of sibling rivalry between the newborn and the family dog, and why women make better moms than men. Babyhood manages to provoke thought about the important questions of when and why to have children, many of which are answered in the book's endearing details.

From the Back Cover:

He's TV's funniest expectant father, star of NBC's Emmy-winning "Mad About You" and a real-life first-time dad. Now, Paul Reiser delivers the follow-up book his twenty-million-plus weekly viewers have been waiting for: an endearing, laugh-out-loud look at the anxieties and delights of bringing up baby.

The fans know what they wantin letter after letter they've asked for Paul's next book. And the terrain couldn't be more perfect: the decision to produce a "little you"; the nerve-racking drive to the delivery room; the art of hypnotizing your newborn to sleep; your baby's graduation from smiles to first laugh, the intricacies of going from a house of two to a house of three.... Paul Reiser takes on babyhood with the charm, tenderness, and uniquely insightful humor that made his first book a hardcover and paperback phenomenon. With a combined total of more than 2.5 million copies in print, Couplehood spent 66 weeks on The New York Times best-seller lists.

On sale to coincide with the birth of America's favorite TV couple's first child, the arrival of Babyhood is heralded by a national signing tour and media appearances by the proud father himself.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0688149790
• ISBN 13: 9780688149796
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240