Rocking Fatherhood: The
Dad-to-Be’s Guide to Staying Cool. By Chris Kornelis. Illustrations by
Aaron Bagley. Da Capo. $13.99.
How to Be a Man (and other
illusions). By Duff McKagan, with Chris Kornelis. Da Capo. $15.99.
Apparently Guns N’ Roses
co-founder Duff McKagan is now a world-renowned expert on manliness and
fatherhood. He not only has his own book on the subject but also provided the
forward to Rocking Fatherhood by
Chris Kornelis. According to Kornelis’ book, it is apparently very important to
have a way of “staying cool” amid the ups and downs and towering emotions of
incipient fatherhood. If that is indeed your goal, Kornelis’ week-by-week guide
is available to help. Kornelis tries relentlessly to be amusingly upbeat – the
Aaron Bagley illustrations are a big help with this – but actually manages to
produce a rather honest and useful parenting guide, almost in spite of himself.
There is an underlying cheat code here: the weeks Kornelis chronicles are those
of his wife’s second pregnancy, so
anyone who marvels at how much cool stuff Kornelis learned needs to understand
that he had practice. The “cool” notion itself is a rather juvenile one, but
the discussions in the book are more on the adult side, even when Kornelis
tries to keep them light. For instance, regarding swaddling, he writes, “How
tight is tight enough? You know how tight taco truck employees wrap those
burritos? That’s how tight you are going to wrap up your baby. Seriously. And,
no, there is no such thing as a good ‘loose’ swaddle. That’s an inadequate
swaddle. That’s a failed swaddle.” That is, presumably, an uncool swaddle. A
cool one also involves using a “Metallica: Ride the Lightning” T-shirt for
swaddling, which is what Bagley’s four-part illustration shows. In the last
part, the baby is happily asleep. But what Bagley does not show is a screaming,
twisting, inconsolable baby at the start of the process – this one looks at
most a bit grumpy. Apparently real-baby behavior that makes swaddling appropriate
just isn’t cool. Still, Kornelis’ heart is certainly in the right place:
“Pregnancy and parenthood have become minefields of industry and alarmism,
which is why expectant parents hear ‘having a baby changes everything’ more
often than ‘having a baby is pure joy.’” Indeed, one chapter title here is
“Having a Baby Doesn’t Change Everything,” which is nice to know. Other chapter
titles try to keep things light: “Don’t Let Her Microwave Bologna,” for
example, and “It’s OK. Nobody Else Knows How They’re Going to Make It Work,
Either.” But the underlying information here, despite Kornelis’ penchant for
finding people in the music industry to quote (no surprise there: he is a music
journalist), is genuinely helpful for those who find the style of its delivery
amusing rather than, say, irritatingly coy. Kornelis deals with sex and
birthing courses and finances and free time (impossible to find but necessary)
and how important it is to “Take Studies, Recommendations, and (Especially)
Books with a Grain of Salt.” Bravo for that, and it applies to Rocking Fatherhood as much as any other
book. There is plenty of solid advice here; how much of it you absorb will
depend on whether or not you find Kornelis’ style as warmly (or coolly)
inviting as he wants it to be.
Kornelis came by his McKagan
forward honestly: he helped McKagan write his own book. Kornelis may not be
credited on the front or back cover, but there he is on the copyright page.
Apparently someone thinks, probably correctly, that McKagan’s name alone is
needed to sell How to Be a Man to
people who consider McKagan the epitome of manliness, or at least a proof that
rock-and-roll fame is sometimes survivable. The very structure of this book’s
title is intended to cash in on the popularity of McKagan’s previous book, It's So Easy (and other lies),
which told how he got sober at the ripe old age of 30, then went back to school
and fell in love and became a father and basically discovered that all the
ultra-conventional stuff against which rock musicians rail at considerable
length was really a lot better than dying of a heroin overdose at age 20:
“There isn’t nobility in dying before you get old.” Anyone who thinks “well,
duh” about that statement is not
in this book’s intended audience. The book is for dyed-in-the-wool McKagan fans
who are prepared to go “oh, wow” at such discoveries as the importance of
staying humble, the need to pick the right person with whom to have children,
and the value of looking at yourself in the mirror each night and asking
yourself basic questions about whether you did the best you could that day. The
book is chatty and conversational, with a style notably reminiscent of the
style of Rocking
Fatherhood, but it is much less of an advice
book – even though it has plenty of advice in it – than it is a book for people
who will pay attention to the advice specifically because of its source.
McKagan deserves credit for escaping the sex-drugs-and-destruction spiral for
which rock music has been well known for many decades. He told about that
escape in his previous book, which as a result was more gripping than this one,
in which his escape is accomplished and he is reveling in being a 50-year-old
father who practices his profession, music, with far more care and maturity
than he did in his 20s. The lessons here are mostly common-sense ones, and
while it is true that common sense is scarcely a common commodity, the extent
to which McKagan plays up the revelatory discoveries in his own life is
uncalled-for. Fans are as likely to get the book for McKagan’s advice on albums
to own and books to read as they are to get it for life suggestions. Come to
think of it, the albums-and-books elements come across more smoothly and
sincerely than does much of the advisory material.
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