Light, Shadows, and the Rambles: Adam Gopnik's flashes of elucidation are brilliant and memorable, but his self-indulgent ruminations puncture the mood he's so able to evoke so poignantly. "Through the Children's Gate" needs a ruthless editor (his young daughter, Olivia?) to urge Gopnik to rethink his ramblings and perhaps combine them as a single, diaristic whole--and leave the pristine quality of the best essays--on Varnadoe, Peter Pan, the goldfish--to stand briilliantly on their own.

Wow, this book really took me by surprise. I like Gopnik and regularly read his articles and talk pieces in the New Yorker, but I hadn't quite realized what it would be like to read an entire collection of his essays in one gulp (I admit that I have not read Paris to the Moon, but I certainly will now). Among other things, he writes about his children and their amusing foibles, the amusing foibles of Gopnik and his wife as they make decisions about their children, the illness and death of his best friend, what it means to live in Manhattan after the terrorist attacks of 2001, and his own psychoanalysis, in one of the gentlest yet most penetrating essays in the book.

This book is far more than the sum of its parts. I am probably susceptible to its charm because of my age (46) and race (white), and I doubt that it would speak as clearly to much younger people or people who don't share some of the same cultural assumptions made in the book. On the other hand, although I love New York, I have never lived there. I'm not Jewish, and I have no children, so in those respects the book should not have been so touching to me. Yet it was. I think it's not for everyone, but I think that it is a wonderful addition for those to whom it speaks. ( )