Cheryl Truman on books

How to Raise a Superchild! Every Parent’s Simple, Step-by-Step Guide (by Ray G. Strobel “and the staff of the American Superchild Institute,” Health Communications, Inc., $12.95) may be one of the worst books I’ve ever seen, and this is being written by someone who (1) got genuinely excited about the arrival of Bret “The Hitman” Hart’s autobiography yesterday and (2) thinks the icanhascheezburger.com LOLcats book may be the answer to all my holiday giving.

So it’s not as if I can’t appreciate a little low-end pop culture, because if Bret Hart can write more than 500 pages about professional wrestling I can completely absorb that 500 pages; wrestling tell-alls are one of the underappreciated genres in literature. And while the perpetrators of this superchildren book may argue that they’re satirizing the crude mentality of the upper-income parents who alway assumes that their kids are not only rich, but brilliant — really, they just want your $12.95.

And it’s not even that I begrudge anybody $12.95 for unfunny humor (raise your child to be a celebrity chef! Pope! billionaire! chess master!), you would hope that any publisher which could manage to press paper together could also afford spell check. Because the occupational hazard of the chess master is spelled “hemorrhoids,” people, not “hemorroids.”

A better choice: Fran Lebowitz knocked off the overstriving parents genre in her short essay, “Vocational Guidance for the Truly Ambitious” now anthologized in The Fran Lebowitz Reader, available for the piddling sum of $10.17 at amazon.com. Lebowitz is a master of compact snark, and her books are things that you will in fact be proud to have on your shelves. This sets them apart from How to Raise a Superchild!, which proves only that the only truly cute chubby-cheeked toddler is the one that belongs to you.