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An excellent study of the cultural forces that went into creating the idea of the "good mother" - attachment parenting and a host of other ideas constructing (mostly by men) that put mothers in an impossible bind. Be constantly available to your baby. Follow your instincts, but trust your doctors. The research portions of the book are woven together with Reddy's own experience as a mother. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, with a special focus on the women in the shadows of that research program. The wives of these famous researchers, it turns out, had lots to say about mothering (who knew?), and/but their careers were sidelined for their husbands.

"The underlying problem is that the 'good mother' isn't really a person. She's a subject of capitalism, charged with optimizing every aspect of her kids' childhood so she can produce good future workers and consumers. And this, too—the competitiveness and individualism baked into our image of the good mother sacrificing anything to get the best for her kids—is part off the trap. If we're indoors obsessing over whether our baby is meeting developmental milestones fast enough or which private preschool to select for our toddler, if we're memorizing scripts that promise to fix tantrums and googling lunchbox hack, we're not out in our communities organizing for universal pre-K or free school lunches. The good mother thinks always of her own children first." (8)

This is a great and quick-reading memoir by my colleague at Rutgers-Camden. Each chapter is a short essay for each year of McAllister's life. My favorite essay was 2006 when Tom is in Iowa City and dealing with a tornado for the first time. He's lived most of his life in Philadelphia, and the book offers an interesting picture of Philly during his early years 90s and 00s.

I'm always amazed at how vulnerable people are willing to be in memoirs, and this is no exception.

My favorite passage is about the slam dunk contest from the 2005 essay:

"I want to clarify something: dunks matter more than you think they do. You may want to tell me it's all a big dumb spectacle, and the scoring doesn't make sense, and it's just a show to sell Sprite and sneakers, and yes, sure, that's what it is. But strip all the nonsense away and you see an aesthetic achievement that can only be performed by a tiny percentage of humans in world history. Each dunk is one of the most perfect sporting feats on the planet, a beautiful expression of athletic perfection, of power, speed, and creativity. These players—their bodies built specifically for this task, spinning in the goddamn air, not just floating because there's no violence propelling it, and throwing it down behind their heads with more grace and fluidity in the coordination than many dancers—are the culmination of a century worth of training, learning, and evolutionary adaptations." (90)