The work has been atop my personal queue for a while, and the writing is excellent.

Still, after spending the better part of the last decade admiring Grann as a writer, the preface to his book made me disrespect him as a guy.

The goal of the preface, of course, is to explain why an ordinary dude would even think to go and report a story in a remote part of the Amazon jungle from which few have returned, and go there for an indefinite amount of time. In the process, he reveals that he a) has a one-year-old son and b) took out a second life insurance policy before he left.

I’ve got a real problem with this.

For starters, I’m suspect of any dad who voluntarily puts life-altering work (read: work that requires extended time away) before family, even if it’s the story of a lifetime and the end result is phenomenal.

Second, I question dude’s judgment; while apologists (and Grann himself) might argue that the process of taking out extra life insurance ultimately had the kid in mind, why would any new father put his life (and his child’s right to have a father) in jeopardy for work (and again, voluntary work at that)?

It all seems pretty egotistical to me.

Plenty of amazing male writers (friends David Howard and Shawn Bean among them) have managed to write great books without risking their lives and abandoning their families for months on end. Why Grann had to go there, I just don’t get.

Of course on the surface, it seems the risks paid off. Grann got his story, the book is fantastic and it’s won all sorts of awards.

But we’ll never know how those months without a father affected that child, how months of life with a single parent shaped the baby’s life forever. At this point, for Grann and his family, these are things they can never quantify. I promise you: In my life, with L and her subsequent siblings, Powergirl and I won’t ever have to try.

The book arrived in the mail earlier this week. I bought it at the recommendation of another stay-at-home Dad. What’s it about? Well, Carle’s postscript says it all:

“In most fish families, after the mother has laid the eggs and the father has fertilized them, the eggs are left on their own. But there are exceptions such as the seahorse, stickleback, tilapia, Kurtus nurseryfish, pipefish, bullhead catfish, and some others. Not only are the eggs cared for by a parent but—surprise—that parent is the father. This may sound strange but it is the truth.”

Never mind that Carle’s illustrations are whimsical and colorful. In this book, his text is informative, too. Heck, even I learned something from reading this thing.

Thankfully, L likes it too. After the initial reading, she demanded that I read it another six times. At this point, I’m sure she enjoys the colors (and the voices I use for the different fish). Someday, however, especially given her daytime pal, undoubtedly she’ll dig the message, too.

Instead of sticking to the self-important memoir, Apple (himself a first-time dad) interweaves real-life data about everything from Lamaze to attachment parenting. He interviews actual experts! He quotes scientific research! Talk about a refreshing change.

My favorite moment of Apple’s opus comes on pages 179-180, where he discusses the process of watching his son, Isaac, wake up. Quite frankly, I couldn’t have described L’s run of the gauntlet any better myself. So here are Apple’s words…

“The only thing we appreciated more than watching Isaac sleep was watching him wake up. The wake-ups would begin with the slightest disturbance of the lips, a movement so subtle that you would never notice it unless you happened to be watching him. A quiet moment would pass and then the wet tip of Isaac’s tongue would appear and disappear again, like a small crustacean peeking out from its shell and deciding the time was not yet right to take on the world. Then another, even longer, pause. You would think that the show was over. You would think that you had imagined the whole thing.

“And then, before you could catch your breath, the second act would begin with a dramatic rise and fall of the eyebrows. The eyelids would somehow remain closed but, as though the eyebrows’ rising had flipped a switch, the rest of the face would now go into a flurry of motion. The nose would twitch. The forehead would wrinkle. The fat of the second chin would quiver like shaken Jell-O. The mouth would move left then right, sending ripples through the soft pink flesh of the cheeks. The second act might last anywhere from ten seconds to a minute. It was impossible to know. The only thing you knew for sure was that you had never seen anything so fascinating in your life.

“And then, just when you were sure it could not get any better, the denouement: Like a magician’s sheet being whisked away to reveal the impossible—the assistant’s body split into two, the rabbit gone and replace by a dove—Isaac’s eyelids would flick open to reveal not pupils but two glowing white orbs. Your instinct would be to applaud but you would have no time because already the yawn would be starting, a yawn so gaping and enormous that it would seem somehow bigger than the face from which it arose. Sometimes the yawn would go on for so long that you would begin to worry that it would never end, that you would have to come to terms with the fact that your child would always have a large hole in the middle of his face. But eventually the mouth would close and the lips would seal. The face would quiet until it was as still as it had been during the peaceful sleep that had preceded the show.

“And then, and only then, would the eyelids open again to reveal two perfect brown irises staring back at you as though nothing out of the ordinary had just taken place.”

Janet Maslin of the NY Times ripped him a new one. Bob Minzesheimer, of the typically milquetoast USA Today, actually asked some pithy questions in this Q&A. You likely can read other reviews by Googling “Home Game” and Lewis’s name.

The truth is: the book really isn’t that bad. I read it over the course of a few mornings on shushing duty with L. Like his other books, the prose is light and moves quickly. Also like his other books, it is clear from the moment you crack the spine that you are reading the musings of a self-obsessed narcissist who takes himself way too seriously.

Controversy has stemmed from Lewis’s assertion that while “maternal love may be instinctive,” paternal love is “learned behavior.”

If he had taken the time and energy to look into the anthropology behind this statement—made the effort to tell us how in other primate species, fathers are absent all together—I might have been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and at least entertained his argument. But the lack of any science behind his argument, coupled with a hearty dose of cynicism about kids in general, made me want to gag. To paraphrase Jerry Maguire, he lost me at hello.

This said, Lewis touches on a number of concepts that definitely resonated.

My first post on this site remarked about early fatherhood as a series of monotonous chores. Lewis definitely experienced that too (which, quite frankly, made me feel a little better about three loads of laundry a day). When he discussed the art of balancing work with different facets of childcare—something I started doing two weeks after L was born—I listened.

The bottom line from my perspective is that any new book that discusses a different approach to fatherhood is worth considering. Not a wholehearted endorsement, but a thumbs up nevertheless.