No wonder Michael Chabon’s wife, Ayelet Waldman, dared risk the ire of Oprah (and America in general) to declare, in her memoir Bad Mother, that she loved her husband more than her children.

In an irate – but very funny – essay deriding the easy credit men get for simply being out in public with their children, he points out that he does do real parenting, but that’s not what he’s being praised for at the supermarket. (‘I cook and clean, do the dishes, get the kids to their appointments, etc.’) If I wasn’t already in love with him, those words and sentiments would’ve done it.

I fell for Chabon’s intellectual charms a couple of months ago, when I read one of the essays from this book in the New York Review of Books, ‘The Wilderness of Childhood’, lamenting the contemporary loss of childhood freedom due to false anxiety over safety, reflecting on what that loss of free play – free of adults – will do to the imaginations of the next generation.

This book is full of wonderful, thoughtful, affecting and amusing personal essays on raising children and being raised, being a husband, being a brother. This Pulitzer Prize winning author (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) needs no comparisons, but I have to make them: Adam Gopnik and David Sedaris. Enough said. Read this book and fall in love. (Or in manly admiration, of course.)