From Amazon.com
Al Roker, the genial weatherman on NBC's top-rated
Today show, has written a book that reads like a long chat over coffee. Light and involving,
Don't Make Me Stop This Car talks frankly about fertility problems, parenting, divorce, adoption, and... 'toons. It turns out that Roker's a cartoon fanatic, and his own capable, funny drawings grace the back cover and chapter headings. In the first half of
Don't Make Me Stop This Car, Roker and his wife,
20/20 correspondent Deborah Roberts, struggle to get pregnant. They conceive a child the old-fashioned way but lose it during the first trimester. Roker candidly discusses the causes of their impaired fertility: his low sperm count and his wife's plummeting progesterone levels. Key doctors are introduced (and, annoyingly, reintroduced) in the ensuing chapters before Leila is delivered via C-section in November 1998. Part two is a collection of essays on topics ranging in seriousness from Ricky Martin to racism. Roker's better with weightier subjects, such as the challenges and pleasures of adoption and foster care. And there are some compelling descriptions of his childhood that make you admire his salt-of-the-earth parents. At times the writing sounds as if Roker dictated and didn't spend much time editing. It's punctuated by exclamations that surely sound better on TV ("Yesss!" "Is this a great country, or what?" "Gotta go!"). But the informality grows less irritating as the book goes on. Ultimately, you're left with a sense of Roker as a middle-class hero--proud of his bus-driver dad but rich enough to buy fertility treatments and then decorate the baby's nursery with trinkets from the "statusphere." All in all, it's a sunny forecast for Mr. Roker's fatherhood book.
--Kathi Inman Berens
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
From Publishers Weekly
TV weatherman Roker comes across as affable, humorously self-deprecating and immensely likable in this memoir of parenthood. His voice is warm and affectionate as he describes his two daughters, Courtney and Leila, and his years of talking into the camera give him an ease behind the microphone that makes him sound as if he is chatting personally with the listener. The material itself, however, is uneven. His struggles to become a fatherAonce through infertility treatments, once through adoptionAare truly compelling, and his reflections about his own father, a bus driver who raised several foster children in addition to his own, are sweet and poignant. But when Roker talks about his own experiences of being a father, he sounds like every other proud parent in the world. He was thrilled when he witnessed his daughters' first steps; he enjoys buying cute little-girl clothes from Baby Gap. Simultaneous release with the Scribner hardcover (Forecasts, June 19). (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
