LIFE WITH FATHER
By Clarence Day
Ebury Press (Random House) - June 2002
ISBN 0091885655 PB
Memoir / Historical Humor
1870s onwards - New York and environs

Reviewed by: Rachel A Hyde, MyShelf.com
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Out of print for too long, here is a brand new paperback edition of the humorous classic that, when it was first serialized back in the 1930s, rescued the flagging New Yorker Magazine. It tells of Clarence Day's early years with his father, the irascible "Clare" Day, Sr., a Wall Street broker.

In Day's understated, matter-of-fact style, he tells how his father tangled with such challenges as: holiday accommodations, the newly-invented telephone, illnesses, his sons' attempts to play musical instruments and hiring a new cook.

The elder Clarence Day was not an easy man to live with. Here was a man who wanted to buy a cemetery corner plot to be buried in "so I can get out," who lay in bed and groaned all night when somebody else was ill (thus alarming the neighbors) and who personally turned iceman when the real thing failed to deliver. He demanded his life be just so, and woe betide the family member, servant or tradesperson who disarranged his perfectly ordered existence.

With the same type of gentle humor as Diary of a Nobody, Life with Father would make a wonderful present for any father, or for anybody else who likes a good old-fashioned laugh.

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