Customer Reviews

I Sleep at Red Lights: A True Story of Life After Triplets

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Bruce Stockler's I Sleep at Red Lights is a wondeful memoir which recounts Stockler's experience, for a couple years at least, of parenting triplets. Stockler's experience is a little different than most dads, however. While his wife is a high-powered lawyer at a Manhattan law firm, Stockler is the one who eventually stays home with the kids. They start out in Manhattan in a small apartment, but eventually move to the suburbs. Stockler's story is very funny and heartwarming. ONe of the things that makes this book work is Stockler's almost brutal honesty--he sugarcoats nothing--not his relationship with his wife or his feelings for his kids. His life has not been picture-perfect in the Norman Rockwell sense, but there is a lot of love in that Stockler family and Stockler shares it with us well. Enjoy.

I heard the author on public radio, talking about his crazy marriage and his book, and so I just bought it. It's a riot! I've never read anything by a man that's at once so funny and observant, but also so touching, emotionally revealing and meaningful. The best part is his brutal honesty--while still being funny--about how difficult marriage is. It's about being a man, being married to a man, juggling marriage and kids--and the chapters on taking his kids to the ladies' room and the supermarkets are classics. My only complaint is--no pictures! Except for the author--and the bags under his eyes tell me this is DEFINITELY a true story.

I'm an older, working, single mother of twins and this is a TERRIFIC book. I think Bruce self-effacingly doesn't convey how even harder it is than his descriptions. Please DO WRITE A SEQUEL -- I am dying to know, as my own children are growing up, how everyone turns out. Highest praise for a wonderful look at a situation much like my own -- this is what books are for: to give one an honest and deep look at another's reality for insights about our own life. Thank you, Dear Bruce and Roni and all four dear children.

I'm a sucker for those old-fashioned, big-family stories like "Cheaper By The Dozen" (now a Steve Martin movie, I see) and "Please Don't Eat The Daisies." This book turns out to be a real-life version that's wonderfully funny and warm and elegantly written, but it's also a deep and illuminating look inside the serious issues of what being a parent means in relation to career, marriage, ego, friends and family, and all the other complications of life. It's great to stumble across a book that really breaks new ground and I'm giving it to my husband and my girlfriends. Great details about the craziness of day-to-day life and wonderfully-drawn characters, too. Also a great book to read out loud.

Wow, I can't remember the last time I laughed out loud when reading a book. I was reading this out loud to my wife and my brother. Stockler's book works on three levels--first, it's just a hilarious adventure story. The chapters on taking the kids to the ladies room (because the men's room is filthy, which he compares to The Andromeda Strain) and going to the supermarket, where the kids cause mayhem, are classics. But underneath all the comedy is a really incredible intelligence, always taking a step back and analyzing how his life works, what's important, and what it's like to be a man. It's also an incredibly honest look at marriage. Stockler admits that he ie emotionally closer to his kids than hiw wife, and, in his own quiet way, it's kind of a revolutinoary statement. He basically says that being married is harder than being a Dad. That takes a lot of guts--but this is one honest book. He also writes about the dynamics of the kids--they way the four of them have a whole spider-web of interlocking relationships--the the eyes for detail that Graham Greene had for his characters. And the third level is the journey he takes--how he folds in his parents and his childhood to deliver us to a discovery of who he is and where he came from. So it's also a very serious book. Much more serious than the cover would have you think. It's a more important memoir than any memoir I've read. While it's not as "important" or post-modern or self-conscious as Dave Egger's masterpiece, I think it is more honest and compelling, and much more true. It's also more insightful than the two Augusten Burroughs books. It's really a one-of-a-kind book and I'm glad I discovered it. Read this book. It will stay in your mind for weeks.

Oh my God. You'll laugh, you'll cry. You will think YOUR life is easy and manageable. You will count your blessings, because the author shows you how. This guy is honest (example: he states that he loves his son more than he loves his wife early on in the book), can really turn a phrase, and loves, loves, loves his (older son) Asher and his babies. I would love to meet him at Starbucks and have a cup of coffee. He is a man who gets it! How about a sequel or two? The kids are only about 7 and 3 when it ends. God bless this lovely, human man.

I Sleep At Red Lights is one of those small, wonderful books that you give to your best friend. That's why my best friend did to me. I fell in love with it and immediately gave it to my book club. We read it together with "AGAINST LOVE: A Polemic," By Laura Kipnis, and together the two books provide an amazing look inside marriage and family. Stockler's book is an unusually honest and provacative account of a role-reversal marriage in which he is the emotional backbone and his wife the provider. It's also a wonderful love poem not only to his children but from all fathers to all children. Kipnis's book is more academic but equally humorous, a scathing and profound attack on the obsolescent institution of marriage, but written from the outside. The difficulties in Stockler's marriage can be partially explained by Kipnis's analysis--both Stockler and his wife find themselves trapped in roles, even though they are reversed--and yet the humor and resiliency in Stockler's book clearly shows how one true life example can confound even the most intuitive, carefully-researched critique. Stockler's marriage shouldn't work, but it does. That doesn't detract from Kipnis's book; in fact, she would probably appreciate the quirky way the Stockler family adapts. Together, these two books make an irresistible reading group package that will keep you talking for weeks.

I absolutely fell in love with this book, a gift from a girlfriend. It's one of those books you pass along to people you love. It's unique--memoir, journey, humorous essay, exploration of marriage--and incredibly passionate. The book received almost no hype, which is a shame, because it's as good or better than most of the 2003 memoirs, large and small--Ambulance Girl, Jarhead, True Notebooks, Hillary Clinton, etc. It's 100 times the book that "A Million Little Pieces" is, but it's almost always about the advertising and the PR, not the book. A charming, intelligent and surprising book, for parents and non-parents alike.

I didn't have triplets, but I did survive colic. I was so relieved that someone out there was more sleep deprived than I was, that I told everyone about this book. Even if you have just one baby at a time, read "I Sleep at Red Lights" for a funny, honest look at the first years of parenthood.

This is a hilarous account of family life told through a man's point of view. The POV is refreshing and it's a book that will have you laughing and nodding your head. For humor from a mother's POV I recommend Debbie Farmer's 'Don't Put Lipstick on the Cat!' I give both books five stars for family humor!