In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks (Adam Carolla)

Memoir - bought from Amazon's Kindle bookstore

I was all ready to be outraged by this book. As any self-respecting woman would be by a book called In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks (And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy). 

The title actually sold me, as I’d never heard of the author. 

But as I began reading I began giggling (I never do that), reading long passages to anyone who’d listen and nodding in sage agreement with everything in the first five chapters. 

To wit, they’re titled: - Kids These Days,- Where Have All The Fellas Gone?;- Motherf**king Nature;- We’ve Built a Minimum-Wage Gilded Cage;- Airport 2010; and- That’s Entertainment?

Also look out for Women Hear Me Roar; God, Religious Tolerance, and Other Shit That Doesn't Exist (hilarious, even though I’m a believer); and Foods I Have a Beef With. 

In short, this book is about Americans - those strange creatures with their self-conscious national neuroses - and, as Adam puts it, “the pussification of America”. 

If I’m being honest, it’s less of a book and more of a comedic rant against assholiness. Be warned, though: it is un-PC, unapologetic, filled with horrendous swearwords, packed with sexist discourse, and pretty well-written by a functional illiterate. It’s stand up, sitting down. 

Who is Adam Carolla? Most Americans will know him from his podcast and multiple radio appearances* (he headlined something called 'The Man Show' for many years, with Jimmy Kimmel), where most of his shtick involves bitching about everything. I’d never heard of him. 

But back to the book, in which Adam bitches about everything from schools’ no-nuts policies (at which point, having spent three weeks with two kids who have nut allergies, I laughed until I cried) and weird facial hair, to airport regulations and “mediocre movies that are supposed to be great”, like Fargo, Lost in Translation, and everything by Pixar. 

He rants about passion-fruit flavoured teas and both dogs and cats. He whines about gender roles, stripper names, and both left and right wing ideologies. He moans about immigration, public schooling, Jewish food, and racism vs. assholiness. 

And then he gets a bit desperate. Because, as several other reviewers have pointed out, the first two-thirds of the book are outstanding. The last third is…filler. Definitely. 

I’ll bet that Adam had half a book’s worth of stuff to say. And the publishers said, ‘Sorry buddy. You need more stuff. We can’t sell this skimpy thing. So look around and bitch about whatever you see.’ 

And that’s what he did. Especially towards the end, when Adam starts giving bite-size advice on stuff in a chapter called Do Yourself a Favour. These include Household Tips (!), Parenting Tips, Hygiene Tips and Life Tips. 

By then I was over it. So I re-read Chapter Two: Kids These Days. 

Buy it. Not because it’ll change your life, but because you’ll laugh. A lot. Read it on the loo. 

* The Adam Carolla Show is the most downloaded podcast on iTunes, with over 2.8 million listeners a month.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Your Sensory Baby (Megan Faure)

Available at all good bookstores and from Penguin Books South Africa. 

So, like all new moms, I have a copy of Baby Sense. 

I’ve read some of it. Like most moms-to-be, I intended to read all of it, but then my baby arrived and my reading ground to a screeching halt. And like several moms, I’m convinced that Baby Sense is part utter genius and part stuff that I’m simply too lazy to try. (Eep! Honesty!)

I do know which page the Jungle Juice recipe is on, though, like everyone else. So that's something. But it was with no small measure of trepidation that I opened Megan Faure’s new book, aimed at helping moms to achieve ‘happy days and peaceful nights’: Your Sensory Baby. Was I ready?

Yup. My trepidation was largely unwarranted.

Before I get into that, however, let me first say that Your Sensory Baby is not a sequel. Not a part II. It’s a whole new book. (It’s not like What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which gets re-vamped and re-written every few years, with the necessary updates and a preggie in increasingly modern attire on the cover.)

So if you’ve read one, or several of Megan Faure’s superb books in the past, you should read this one too. And if you’ve never read one of her books, start here.

The first three chapters of the book are about, you guessed it, senses, and how these influence your new baby’s feelings, sleep and development. You’re also taught to use ‘gentle and flexible’ routines to soothe and feed the little creature. 

They're largely simple and straightforward, mind you, but if they feel like hard work, select the ones that don't... (That's what I've done. Or, am trying to do. Or, will do.)

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are about translating your baby’s behaviour into meaningful signals, about getting your own personality to work for you, and about baby’s potential for development, and from Chapter 7, you’ll encounter age-banded sections – your premature baby, your newborn, your baby at two to six weeks, your baby at six weeks to four months, and so on – that hold answers, tips, techniques and testimonials relating to particular periods in your mommyhood. I really like this element...

So, my take? This book is fantastic.

It’s beautifully presented, easy to read through in detail or to scan with a screaming kid swinging from your neck, and full of useful, user-friendly, simple-to-apply advice you can use immediately, wherever in the parenting game you are. 

Its advice is all-encompassing, and whether you choose to use all of it, some of it or tiny bits of it, depending on the kind of parent you want to be, there's something for you.

I have only one criticism and here it is: the book divides babies into ‘social butterfly’, ‘settled’, ‘slow to warm up’ and ‘sensitive’, and it’s not that easy to tell which one your child is until they’re four months or older. This means that a fair bit of the good value in the book, because it’s linked to the four ‘types’, can’t really be accessed til later. By which time habits have formed – for mommy and baby…

But on the whole, this is a must-read if you’re that sort of mom. You know, the one who has, and reads, most of the must-read mommy/baby/parenting books. Or, the one who wants to.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za