Candace's Reviews > In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays

In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe
Rate this book
Clear rating

by
961812
's review
Dec 26, 2012

it was ok
Read from December 26, 2012 to January 01, 2013

Not cohesive at all. Some essays were really interesting- like The Feminine Mystique of Facebook, and some just so full of ignorance and self-congratulatory insight like The Perfect Parent:

"Most of us do not raise our children amidst a sea of lovely and instructive wooden toys...and healthy organic snacks." Well that's too bad for your child, who is probably playing with plastic toys that are made with hazardous materials including lead, PVC, and mercury, and too bad for the environment being that plastics are not recyclable nor biodegradable. And too bad about those non-organic snacks which are loaded with GMO ingredients- you know, the ones linked to inflammatory disease, the cause of a number of food allergies, and later down the line fertility problems.

"Can we, for a moment, flash back to the benign neglect of the late 1970s and '80s? To children helping themselves to three slices of cake, or ingesting secondhand smoke, or carrying cocktails to adults who were ever so slightly slurring their words."

*Crickets*​ Yeah, those were the days.

Not terrible, but far from great.
2 likes · flag

Sign into Goodreads to see if any of your friends have read In Praise of Messy Lives.
Sign In »

No comments have been added yet.