Through the children's gate

While the writing was as brilliant as ever, I found myself less captured and transported by the book than Paris to the moon. In that sense a little disappointed. The essay on his friend Kirk Varnedoe and the Mighty Metrozoids was beautiful and true.

Gopnik and his wife decide to move with their family from Paris back home to New York City. The chapters of the book consist of little stories about Gopnik's kids, about life in New York City after living in Paris, about New York after 9-11. The subject of the chapters is not important. Gopnik has a way of writing so well, so thoughtfully, that the real subject is clearly living itself. Trying to battle what Gopnik calls “the screens,” the video and computer and game screens that have taken over the lives of Gopnik's children and all American children, was the chapter that hit closest to my heart.