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Beating Up Daddy: A Year in the Life of an Amateur Father
 
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Beating Up Daddy: A Year in the Life of an Amateur Father [Paperback]

Gene Doucette (Author)
3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Follow a year in the life of Gene Doucette, an amateur father who has exquisitely documented the wonder (and horror) of parenting as we turn to the 21st century.

Whether he's on vacation, celebrating the holidays, planning a birthday party . . . or just trying to make it to the end of the week with two live children . . . Gene manages to wrestle humor from the jaws of domestic disarray.

If you are a parent now, if you plan to be a parent in the near future or if you were raised by parents, you'll find more than enough to laugh at in this riotous account of a devoted-yet-disheveled dad.

Beating Up Daddy is the ultimate answer to "parental perplexion."


Product Details

  • Paperback: 200 pages
  • Publisher: White Boucke Pub; 1 edition (May 1999)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1888580097
  • ISBN-13: 978-1888580099
  • Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,543,473 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Gene Doucette is a novelist, a screenwriter, a playwright, a humorist, an essayist, and a few other things. He is, in other words, a writer, and thank goodness for that because the other options were alcoholic (still possible) and axe murderer (less likely.)

There is durable evidence of his existence as a writer, although not as much as one might hope. Beating Up Daddy: A Year in the Life of an Amateur Father, a collection of early humor columns in which Gene rightly takes his children to task for existing, was published in 1999.

A few years later Gene published The OTHER Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: A Parody. This was written shortly after discovering that the actual survival handbook was being sold in, of all places, the humor section of the bookstore, which was unutterably sad insofar as it's not at all funny. The parody, however, is very funny indeed.

Somewhat more recently, Gene decided to do something with the many other humor columns he had lying around. This was after he discovered Amazon doesn't charge

anything for Kindle publishing, but before discovering what a big pain it is to format something for the Amazon Kindle. And so was born Vacations and Other Errors in Judgment.

And then there's the fiction. In October of 2010, Immortal is going to be published by the new Hamel Integrity Publishing. Immortal is a mash-up of science fiction, contemporary fantasy, historical fiction, first-person confessional, humor, and action/adventure. A little bit of everything, in other words; it's a lot of fun. Much more on this as the publication date nears.

What else? There's the sequel to Immortal, creatively titled Hellenic Immortal, which will obviously have to wait a while before debuting. There is Fixer, a novel about a man trying to stop a creature that lives five seconds in the future from killing people in the present. That book is currently looking for a home, largely because Gene has yet to send it anywhere.

And there are the screenplays. Charlatan is a feature length spec script that won the Scriptwriting Network's Hollywood Outreach Program. It's about a professional psychic-- a fraudulent one-- who has to help the FBI stop a killer of professional charlatans before he becomes the next victim. It's based on an early unpublished novel also written by Gene. And there are a number of short films, the most recently produced being Parting, by 386Films.

Finally, Gene has had a number of stage plays produced. Deus Ex Quanta, a full length script incorporating quantum theory and chaos theory into a homicide investigation, has been produced on multiple occasions in four countries and on three continents. Slightly less produced are Artifact-- a discussion of faith with a dual backdrop of alien abduction and plague era France-- and In the Valley of the Shadow, a one act about conspiracy theory and paranoia.

Gene lives in Cambridge, MA, with his wife and two children, and a varying assortment of pets. Although the kids are in college, so really, "wife, varying assortment of pets, and the dirty clothing of two children" might be more accurate.

Contact Gene at genedoucette@me.com

 

Customer Reviews

14 Reviews
5 star:
 (9)
4 star:    (0)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:
 (5)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.6 out of 5 stars (14 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars An amazingly funny book, January 22, 2000
By 
This review is from: Beating Up Daddy: A Year in the Life of an Amateur Father (Paperback)
Doucette captures fatherhood in its best-worst moments, those family events that will be forever burned into the memory of any father worth being called Dad.

This book is not a how-to guide. This book is not full of practical advice. This book is absolutely full of rib-splitting, gut-busting, coffee-spewing, it-hurts-so-funny snapshots of one man and his family. If you are a Dad, you've been there and done that.

The question is, can you laugh at yourself as well as Doucette laughs at himself, and then can you invite the rest of us too laugh too.

Hilarious. I had to stop several times to wipe my eyes I was laughing so hard.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Beating Up Daddy, January 17, 2000
This review is from: Beating Up Daddy: A Year in the Life of an Amateur Father (Paperback)
I've read all of the reviews posted here, and I have to wonder whether the people who gave it only one star actually have a sense of humor. This book is funny, smart, and extremely entertaining. Fully 1/3 of the book is a wonderful account of a vacation gone terribly wrong that can't help but amuse anyone, whether they are a parent or not, yet evidently a number of reviewers seem to think they're qualified to write a review having not read the vacation piece, nor even having read more than three chapters. This book is perhaps mis-listed as a Parenting book rather than a Humor book, but that's the only bad thing I can say about it.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars An enlightening eye-opener. . ., July 1, 1999
This review is from: Beating Up Daddy: A Year in the Life of an Amateur Father (Paperback)
. . .into the world of fatherhood.

Some of you may recognize me from the opening intro of "Beating Up Daddy." I know my Mom does. I am the *Barbara* Gene thanks in his introduction "I Wanna Thank..." Biased? No. So what if I was the one who hired him to write his column on AOL. So what if I saw in that first column the talent of someone who could make the multitudes laugh out loud. Oh, alright . . . I'm a tad biased. He's a wonderful humorist, what can I do. With that said, let's move along.

While Doucette writes of his lively parenting experiences he also offers up an entertaining point of view from both his wife and children.

Readers will see how his children Becky and Tim react to his oft times feeble attempts at humoring them and himself through both home and vacation traumas. His wife Deb, and here I want to say "poor wife" but I feel she enjoys watching him work at Daddy-hood more than she lets on, is a true delight. One which I'm sure a great majority of mothers will relate.

I can highly recommend this work to anyone with or without children, and will recommend this to those who think going to DisneyWorld will be a drop in the bucket. The bucket gets heavy. Read this book or take it with you as an instruction manual. That or stock up on Motrin before you leave town.

Here's to being a fly on the wall for the Doucettes' next vacation. I promise to close my eyes at the appropriate times,

Barbara

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