Rating: 
Summary: A Wonderful Memoir
Review: Bruce Stockler's I Sleep at Red Lights is a wondeful memoir which recounts Stockler's experience, for a couple years at least, of parenting triplets. Stockler's experience is a little different than most dads, however. While his wife is a high-powered lawyer at a Manhattan law firm, Stockler is the one who eventually stays home with the kids. They start out in Manhattan in a small apartment, but eventually move to the suburbs. Stockler's story is very funny and heartwarming. ONe of the things that makes this book work is Stockler's almost brutal honesty--he sugarcoats nothing--not his relationship with his wife or his feelings for his kids. His life has not been picture-perfect in the Norman Rockwell sense, but there is a lot of love in that Stockler family and Stockler shares it with us well. Enjoy.
Rating: 
Summary: Laugh Out Loud Funny and Insightful
Review: I came across Stockler's humor pieces in Esquire and The National Review Online and think he's a great new humorist. I decided to buy the book for my wife and ended up reading it myself. I generally read literary fiction and history, but I found this book really gratifying. The cover makes it look like another dumb parenting book (but I guess it appeals to women), but it's really a deceptively complex memoir about life -- marriage, work, how we see ourselves as men. I found the author's take on marriage refreshingly honest -- and his observations about his children both insightful and framed in a larger context. This book isn't for everybody -- if you're looking for a Paul Reiser Dave Barry type read, this is not it. Stockler writes at a much higher level, but I don't think some people are going to "get it." A very rewarding book for the intelligent reader.
Rating:
Summary: The Most Surprising Memoir
Review: I read one of the author's Op Ed pieces, saw the title of the book, and decided to give it a try. This book was the most wonderful surprise, as fresh as a smack across the face, as funny as Jon Stewart on a roll, as honest as a Norah Jones song. The author's relationship with his wife is rendered with amazing depth and complexity, but it's his pulsating awareness of how important his children are and how blessed every day is that makes the book such a joy to read. The only negative is the cover, which makes it look like one of those ooey-gooey baby books I never read. You should definitely give it a read.
Rating:
Summary: Action Adventure Love Story
Review: I'm a single woman with no children and could not be induced to read a book on "parenting" if it were the last tome left on a scorched earth after the last book-barbecue. Luckily that's not what this is. It is a love story told at an action-adventure pace about what happens to a relationship when two strong-willed personalities are faced with a spectacularly successful IVF attempt.Does everything end happily ever after? Hell no, there's a lot of headbutting and that 's what you've got to love about this book, Stockler is disarmingly honest about marital dynamics post delivery, about his neuroses and hers. These are two very strong characters who can really duke out those issues about the expectations of what "Mommy" does and what "Daddy" does that lurk right below the covers of most marriage of this generation with kids. The kids are characters and Stockler's descriptions of their
oddyssies through supermarkets and, in one of the funniest scenes from a memoir in modern memory, when Stockler takes the triplets and their slightly older brother to the ladies
room at a mall (a chapter worth [$$$] on its own), but more interesting is the undlerlying relationship he has with his wife. Both are strong willed and awkwardly shuffling classic
gender roles, challenging each other without a road map as the encounter some rough road -- corporate America may give lip service to the Little League Dad, but has no tolerance for a male primary care parent who needs to
invoke the same privileges woman have been afforded, Stockler finds. This guys is hilarious, but even more rare he is emotionally honest about family life which so often is suffused with
mawkishness or self-conscious irony. Stockler is really trying to figure out how to live happily ever after. I read this book in one night!!!
Rating:
Summary: Under My Xmas Tree
Review: My sister gave me this book for Mother's Day because I was complaining about how my husband would rather watch the Braves or Falcons than play with the kids. What an amazing and incredible book! The author is a magazine editor married to a lawyer, and they have a fairly typical role-reversal marriage--he takes care of the kid on nights and weekends, she does renovation projects--but their lives are turned upside down when they have triplets. The way he writes about his feelings for his kids, and his tensions with his wife, are incredibly honest and hilariously true. The author loses his job, becomes a full-time stay-at-home Dad, they move to the suburbs, they suffer a death in the family--it's really a roller coaster ride, and the writing is just beautiful. I laughed out loud and I cried. I read some reviews where they didn't like the wife, but I did--she's a real person, with good and bad sides, and not a black and white character like in most memoirs. I can't get my husband to read the book--but all my girlfriends have and I'm giving it to my mother-in-law for Xmas--my last hope. She'll understand!
Rating:
Summary: This is real life
Review: Oh my God. You'll laugh, you'll cry. You will think YOUR life is easy and manageable. You will count your blessings, because the author shows you how. This guy is honest (example: he states that he loves his son more than he loves his wife early on in the book), can really turn a phrase, and loves, loves, loves his (older son) Asher and his babies. I would love to meet him at Starbucks and have a cup of coffee. He is a man who gets it! How about a sequel or two? The kids are only about 7 and 3 when it ends. God bless this lovely, human man.
Rating:
Summary: Family Values, Great Writing
Review: The author is a humor writer who uses his skills to dig deep down inside the unique and chaotic situation of his home life--having triplets, losing his job, becoming a stay at home Dad, trying to work through a difficult marriage--by paying attention to the little details that make a story absorbing and pulling back to reveal how much energy it takes to change the course of your life. A really joyful, liberating look at fatherhood and family life that deserves a much wider audience than the baby book ghetto it has been lumped into.
Rating:
Summary: Hilarious!
Review: This is a hilarous account of family life told through a man's point of view. The POV is refreshing and it's a book that will have you laughing and nodding your head. For humor from a mother's POV I recommend Debbie Farmer's 'Don't Put Lipstick on the Cat!' I give both books five stars for family humor!
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting book, unlikeable man
Review: This is an at-times funny book, especially the author's descriptions of when his kids get older. It is interesting to see them develop unique personalities and the parents should be commended on trying to make sure the kids (including the oldest, non-triplet son) grow up close to their siblings.
But my enjoyment of the book was marred by several things. For one, the author is very clear about his favortism towards his sons at the expense of his daughter. I can't help but think about how she'll feel growing up and reading that one day. While the author worried about letting her be too much of a typical girl, because he thought he would spend sleepless nights worrying about her during her teen years, a more pressing issue are the sleepless nights he'll endure while she's out dating man after man trying to find the love and attention she didn't get from her father.
Also I have to wonder what kind of man sits back letting his wife work 90 hours a week at a job she hates, fighting with her over who gets to wheel the stroller down the block to the coffee shop the few times she is home, and won't improve his wife's work/family balance by either getting a job of his own or moving to any one of the numerous places they could raise a family for less money. The only real reasons he gives for not moving are that their family is close (although they don't seem to see them that much anyway) and that he doesn't like change. Maybe not, but a change where your kids actually get to grow up with a mom would be a change worth making.
Rating:
Summary: Hilarious!
Review: This is an extremely funny, and extremely well written book. It is also a light read. Anybody who has kids and has silently thanked God that they did not have twins or triplets themselves will enjoy Stockler's honest and witty rendering of what life with triplets is really like (i.e., chaotic and sleep-deprived). Unfortunately, my enjoyment of this book was marred by my increasing dislike of Stockler's wife. If Stockler described their relationship and her involvement as a parent honestly, I can't understand why he remains married to her and/or why she ever bothered to go through IVF in the first place. She is a high powered New York lawyer, who works until at least 10 pm most nights and often later. Stockler's book is a litany of all the important rites of passage that Roni missed because she was at work, as well as all the "unimportant" (but just as crucial from the perspective of a child) day in and day out moments that make up the bulk of child-rearing. I am a working mother myself, but I took unpaid leaves of absence for the first years of both my children's lives, and I gladly put up with lowered productivity (and hence salary) now in order to make my children my highest priority. I might have been more understanding if Stockler's wife was doing important, challenging work that she found fulfilling, but according to Stockler, she HATED her job and was there just for the money. And it was at that point I lost sympathy for both her and Stockler. There are more important things than money, and being there to raise your children well is one of them. Stockler acknowledged repeatedly through the book that Roni didn't have to endure that brutal work schedule, that they could have moved to a more affordable region of the country and gotten by on what she (or he) could have made in a more normal job with less brutal work hours. The big unanswered question in the book is why the heck they didn't, then. But Stockler wasn't much of a hero himself. As you read the book, his obvious love for his children shines through (although while I appreciate his honesty in pointing out his difficulties in bonding with the one girl, Hannah, I cringe to think of how she will feel one day when she reads this book), and you've got to admire his willingness to be not just Mr. Mom, but Mr. Mom of triplets and an older child. But I found myself wishing he would read a few parenting manuals, as some of his parenting tactics (offering bribes for good behavior, letting the children stay up as late as they want on school nights) leave much to be desired. I know it is hard to be firm and enforce rules, and it must be exponentially more difficult when dealing with three toddlers at once, but as every parent (except, apparently, Stockler) knows, giving in is easier in the short term but sets disastrous precedents for the long run. The giving in and bribes sure make for more entertaining reading, but I can't help but think that these are going to be some pretty out of control teenagers. I probably shouldn't criticize when I have not (thank God) had to deal with the breath-taking logistical problems of raising triplets. That Stockler has been able to do so while maintaining a sharp sense of humor is to his credit. However, I think it is fair to say that when I reached the end of the book, my memories of having chuckled through most of it were overshadowed by the sad realization that this book portrays the worst of modern American culture: when a big paycheck is more important than spending time with your children.
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