Books like The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care — picked by fans

Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood is a comprehensive and important history of American children and their varied experiences.

By synthesizing a large literature in engaging prose, Mintz introduces readers to children’s lives across four centuries of the American past, starting in the seventeenth century and reaching into the present. Mintz strives to encompass different racial, class, and gender experiences. 

This is the best book to begin exploring the new field of children’s studies.

Sociologist Viviana Zelizer began the research quest to understand modern American childhood and policies toward children by proposing that how we understand the value of children changed radically in the late nineteenth century. 

By redefining children as emotional assets rather than as economic investments—as objects of love and caretaking, rather than contributors to the household and public economy—American parenting was revolutionized.

This fundamental transformation offers the basis for understanding policy changes, a new commitment to schooling, and other efforts on behalf of children that took root at the turn of the twentieth century.

Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America probes what I consider to be the basic dilemma of modern American parenting – how the love for children and concern for their welfare has led to growing anxiety among parents eager to do it right. 

In imaginative research into different dimensions of culture, Stearns shows that middle-class parents became increasingly self-conscious and self-questioning about meeting the needs of their children starting in the early twentieth century. The book probes the emotional consequences of modern parenting’s commitment to encouraging child expression and individual happiness.

Stearns’s exploration demonstrates one of the consequences of the revolution—from viewing children as having utility to having only emotional value—first defined by Zelizer. It suggests how even the best-intended changes can have unexpected consequences.

How we treat children has a political dimension and is related to policies toward children.

A Right to Childhood discusses the first and only time that the United States created a federal agency to investigate and help direct child life. Lindenmeyer traces the origins of the Children’s Bureau to the fierce efforts of reform-minded women, and considers the agency’s attempts to improve the welfare of all children, including the children of the poor and foreign.

Starting with concerns about very high rates of infant mortality in the United States, the bureau moved on to study and inform mothers about children’s health, nutrition, and development, and issued a widely- distributed and influential guide to child rearing to mothers across the country.

For me, the experience of the Children’s Bureau provides an important lesson about how policies can be created and their political vulnerabilities.

I read this book as a boy, and I couldn’t put it down. It’s the story of American PT boats in the South Pacific during World War II, and the story behind the title captivated me. Every soldier knows that he or she might be sacrificed by a commander to gain time for a retreat or as part of a super-dangerous mission.

The sailors on the boats in White’s story were living examples of how they could be expendable. Even as a boy, this book made me grateful for what I had and grateful to the members of the uniformed services who protected us. That they would make such a commitment makes me love America even more. 

James Jones's brilliant debut novel must have had a great effect on me because I admit, in many ways, my book covers the same ground – how does a man maintain honor and dignity when constrained to live his life by the choices of other, and much more powerful men? I suppose the difference between our two themes is that the question in my book is about those same choices but wrapped in the question of race. Jones’s characters, while in the military, were dealing with personal issues. My Corporal Buck is dealing with an issue about which all of America is on fire.

From Here to Eternity is 70 years old. I read it in 1969, an eternity ago and it has lasted with me from there to here.  When I was in the Marine Corps I knew everything that was happening to me. But I didn’t know what… show more.

Filled with spunk and humor, this novel also highlights a less-known aspect of the war. A conscientious objector serves as a smokejumper in Oregon, parachuting into forest fires to fight them. His former sweetheart, who broke up with him for being “cowardly,” serves in the Women’s Army Corps. When her brother dies fighting a mysterious fire, she breaks every rule imaginable to investigate—but the results could be devastating. The exploration of the true meaning of courage and honesty adds incredible depth to this story.

Todd Bowden, a middle-class boy, has everything good going for him until he meets Kurt Dussander, a man who was the pure embodiment of evil during Hitler’s Nazi regime, now living in America under the assumed name, Arthur Denker. Todd figures out who “Arthur Denker” is from crime magazines his father had kept in a trunk in the garage.

Todd’s curiosity for violence rises to the surface. He is increasingly drawn down into darkness, blackmailing Mr. Dussander to tell him what went on in the concentration camps.

Kristóf (1935-2011) was a Hungarian writer who fled to Switzerland during the war and wrote in French.

The Notebook (the first in the trilogy) is currently number one on my list of all-time favourites. It has all the elements of storytelling that I love: deep, psychological insight into the human heart; adroit use of archetypes, which give the book a timeless, folkloric feel; concision (no waffling) and a poetic, pared-back language that creates a sense of startling immediacy.

Kristóf writes about World War II through the eyes of two young brothers in a Nazi-occupied country (unnamed), and she shocks us awake not through sensationalised violence but through matter-of-fact narration.

It reads like a cross-between dramatic monologue and biblical parable – she stretches the novel form and opens up new possibilities for writing. 

Taylor’s book was controversial in many ways. He contradicted many of the conventional wisdoms about the war, but more importantly, he annoyed the stuffy world of historical academia by writing popular history which was accessible to a wide readership. He certainly led me to realise that history can be immediate and compelling rather than distant and dry.