It's Not the Stork - Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley

A wonderful book about where babies come from for kids 4-8. Entirely done in cartoon-style illustrations, with age-appropriate descriptions of bodies, babies, and sex. With my three-year-old I just narrate the pictures - there are too many words to read them all aloud, though she'll grow into the text. Buy this early and read it yourself, so that you're not stumped when your child asks some unexpected sex question.

Thanks to my friend Dan for recommending this.

It's Not the Stork: A Book about Girls, Boys, Babies, Bodies, Families, and Friends
Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley
2006
Available from Amazon

The $64 Tomato - William Alexander

A nice gardening memoir. It doesn't exhort you to go out and grow all your own food, and it has a nice balance between what's great about gardening and what's tough. Also has an excellent short (well-chosen) gardening bibliography in the back. It inspired me to want to grow more vegetable, but kept my feet on the ground about the difficulty involved.


The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden
William Alexander
2006
Available from Amazon

Flotsam - David Wiesner

An extraordinary children's book.

Winner of the Caldecott Medal (awarded each year to the artist of the best children's picture book), and boy are you glad you didn't have a picture book in the running the year this book was published.

Flotsam
David Wiesner
2006
Available from Amazon

A Map of the Child - Darshak Sanghavi

I read this book a couple of months ago and didn't recommend it because I was bothered by a couple of science errors, but I have since thought about it often, so I think it's worth recommending in spite of my original hesitation.

Sanghavi is a pediatric cardiologist who has seen some stuff, and he talks about children's illnesses from the perspective of the doctors who treat them. He covers some of the same ground as Atul Gawande and even, surprisingly, Mutants by Armand Marie Leroi. But there is additional interesting material here. The section I have thought most about is one where he writes about the first case of child abuse he saw as a doctor.

Just to get it off my chest, here are the science errors that bugged me. 1) He says that the US swine flu vaccination program on 1976 caused an epidemic of Guillain-Barre cases. And while this is a common accusation, I've read a convincing account elsewhere (unfortunately I can't remember where) that this the association is spurious. 2) He refers to celiac disease as an allergy, when it is actually an intolerance - there is no histamine reaction in celiac disease.


A Map of the Child: A Pediatrician's Tour of the Body
Darshak Sanghavi
2003
Available from Amazon