Childhood in New York

Adam Gopnik's Through the Children's Gate is the best book about parenting I have ever read. That may not have been his aim; Through the Children's Gate is Gopnik's follow-up to the best-selling Paris to the Moon, which warmly described the pleasures—especially the gastronomic ones—of fin-de-siecle Paris. In that book the kids were a bit of an afterthought, and here the focus is in part on how families have changed New York City, driving out the hipsters, the criminals, and the artsy demi-monde. But along the way Gopnik drops one apparently casual observation after another on the challenges and rewards of child-rearing.

The book, like Paris to the Moon a collection of Gopnik's New Yorker articles pieced together with excerpts from yearly holiday journals, is sometimes uneven. A few chapters, notably the one on parrots and switch hotels, feel out of place. But there are utterly memorable scenes from the lives of his children: his daughter's hyper-busy imaginary friend Charlie Ravioli; a famous art historian who spends the last summer of his life coaching a youth football team called the Giant Metrozoids; Gopnik's effort to communicate with his son through the language of electronic media. The chapters seem to get better as the book progresses, as his children grow up and develop interesting personalities of their own.