I loved this book. It was sufficiently poignant, but laugh out loud hilarious. If possible listen to the audio book. It's a real NYC book!

I loved this book. Full of chapters that read as short stories (or vice versa), it brought back lots of good memories of the Upper East Side of NYC. The author has terrific insights and conveys them to the reader almost effortlessly. I went back and read the first chapter upon finishing the book...that's how much I enjoyed it.

Gopnick is a smart, observant writer, and this collection of essays about his family's return to living in New York City after several years abroad has some gems. A few were skippable but I generally enjoy a good writer's ability to turn mundanities into insights so none were outright bad or even close to it. Bonus points for his love and appreciation for our city.

An excellent collection of short essays on life in New York, raising children, finding a life philosophy, and being in a marriage. I laughed, I cried, I felt enriched. Can't think off a better recommendation.

“We can’t make any kind of life in New York without composing a private map of it in our minds – and these inner maps, as Roger Angell once wrote, are always detailed, always divided into local squares, and always unfinished.” P.3-4

Gopnik, like many of the writers for The New Yorker is someone I that I always thought I should read. I have an internal censor who has always believed that reading should be good for you and that entertainment is less important than learning. My training as a librarian only reinforced this idea. I was taught that there are books that are not good enough for a public library.

However, I have learned that sometimes reading starts for the pleasure of meeting some new people. So, even though I thought Gopnik might be good for me, I picked this book up because of the title. What is the Children’s Gate? Why does it matter to Gopnik? Turns out it is an entrance to Central Park near a playground and Gopnik saw his return to New York as part of his role as a parent. In 2000 it was time to introduce his children to New York City and so as a family they were entering the Children’s Gate.

Now we can look back on the fall of 2000 as a life-changing moment for the whole country, but especially for New Yorkers. I did not realize when I started this book of essays that 2000 was when Gopnik returned to NYC from Paris. The book was published in 2007, which allowed some space between 9-11 and the collection. Some of the essays were written right under that tragic event and had an immediacy that I had almost forgotten.

Although some of the essays in this book are a bit dated, if you are interested in families, New York City, good writing, or even revisiting the events of 9-11, you should pick this up. Gopnik is a good parent, with interesting insights into child rearing. He is an excellent writer who finds intriguing subjects including jazz, death and computers. All of these subjects are woven into a fascinating narrative.

Other books of essays that I have enjoyed:
The Faraway Nearby
For the Time Being
Last Watch of the Night
Telling Time: Angels, Ancestors and Stories

This was also a library sale find. I find Gopnik's writing *dense* but also cant put him down. A classic New Yorker writer. There were a couple of laughs-out-loud and I enjoyed the chance to follow his children's, especially his son Luke's, growing up. And his own life lessons as well.

Gopnik is a liberal, humane essayist with the sensibilities of a stand-up comic (or is it the opposite?), and my enjoyment of his work cannot be overstated. A loveletter to New York City, sure, but more broadly a love letter to all cities, to the flowering of chaos and beauty that comes from the density of a city. If you need a book to affirm your decision to not be a driver, this may be it.

When it's good, it's SO good. But when it's not, it's SO boring. Gopnik's writing can be breathtakingly beautiful when he hits the mark, but it can also be mindnumbingly dull when he misses. More hit than miss with this one, but still too many too long rambles.
I really enjoyed Paris to the Moon, but haven't read it in years. I'm wondering now if I felt this way about that one then.
I do love his use of words and the love he has for his family, especially his kids really comes through. And being able to read about the NYC places I visited was a treat. I just wish he didn't get lost on endless tangents so often.

I've heard a very good friend of mine use the term "dabbler" more than once. That term fits Adam Gopnik very well. He's a writer for The New Yorker and will seemingly write about anything that catches his attention or, possibly, that he's been assigned to write about. (Though he's been writing for the magazine for thirty years now, and perhaps he chooses his own assignments.) Anyway, his modus operandi seems to me to be to cover a subject, but not dig very deeply into it.

Through the Children's Gate is a book about New York City - primarily Manhattan - and a New York City that he knows. (Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it seems to cover a fairly narrow scope.)
One problem with Through the Children's Gate is that many of the essays are simply not very interesting. Mr. Gopnik writes a lot about his family - primarily about his children - and that ends up being close to the experience of people showing you photographs of their children. The photos mean a lot to them, probably not so much to you.

When he steps away from writing about his family, there are other problems. "That Sunday" is a revisiting of a Sunday gig at the Village Vanguard in 1961 by the Bill Evans Trio that was recorded. It's well known in jazz history, but it seems strange to me that someone would write about that gig when John Coltrane was blowing the roof off the Vanguard later that year in gigs that were recorded. And when Ornette Coleman's groups at the Five Spot around that time were changing the ways that many musicians played jazz and the ways that many listeners heard and listened to the music. I guess that Bill Evans' music is more palatable to the average New Yorker reader than Trane's or Ornette's.
When Mr. Gopnik writes about his friend Kirk Varnedoe, an art historian and teacher, he focuses on descriptions of Mr Varnedoe coaching a team of eight year old football players, which included Mr. Gopnik's son. The article certainly humanizes Kirk Varnedoe - that's a fine thing - but it generally ignores his teaching and writing, which I wanted to know more about. Instead I learned about his football coaching skills - interesting and humanizing - but there obviously was more to the man than that.

Through the Children's Gate seems like a book that was cobbled together from previously written articles simply to make a book - not always a good thing, and in this case, definitely not.

My favorite bit of writing in the book was an epigraph:

"Interviewer: Sir, How do you survive in New York City? What do you eat?
Sid Caesar (as The Wild Boy): Pigeon.
Interviewer: Don't the Pigeons object?
Sid Caesar: Only for a minute.

- from Your Show of Shows (attr. Mel Brooks)

edit - I did enjoy reading Gopnik's Paris to the Moon. Now I'm not sure if it actually was a good book or if the fact that I've never been to Paris just made it a piece of exotica to me.

Adam Gopnik writes for the New Yorker, but since I don’t read that magazine, I first encountered him when I read “Paris to the moon”, his collection of essays about his family’s years living in Paris – first himself and his wife, and then the two of them and the children they had while they lived there. I loved that book, although it’s interesting to me to note that the only part of it I really remember is the section on their experience of the French health system as they were going through his wife’s first pregnancy. I love “travel writing” of this type – the “we moved there and this is what we experienced” type of writing, and it’s actually not common to find good writing in the genre: there are many more people traveling and writing about their travels than there are people who have the talent to actually say something interesting about their travels. (“The reluctant Tuscan” by Phil Doran comes to mind as an example of a moving to Italy story that should have been left unwritten.)

Anyway, I loved “Paris to the moon,” so when I learned that Gopnik had a new book out I marched right over to Queen Anne Books and bought it (in hardcover, no less). I wasn’t all that engaged with the book at first. The title and description of the book implied that it was going to focus on the experience of moving back and living in NYC with children, but it’s another collection of essays, may of them clearly published for the New Yorker, and several of them have nothing to do with Gopnik’s children or even the experience of being parents of children in NY. The first three essays – one about 19th-century writer, one about Gopnik’s relationship with his psychiatrist, and one about Gopnik’s explorations into the world of Judaism that he was only nominally raised in -- left me almost regretting that I had bought the book. But then he began to actually write about what he was observing in his life and the life of the city around him and the book got more compelling. The essays about living in the city in the wake of 9/11 were really good and by the end of the book I was regretting that it was done, although I found the last essay to be weak – almost a forced attempt to live up to the introduction, which talked about the Children’s Gate into Central Park (there apparently are designated gates into the park, including a children’s gate). Still, this is one of the better books I read during the first few months of the year, and I can actually imagine myself re-reading some of the essays, so this one will find a spot on the travel/memoirs shelf.

I wish Adam Gopnik would write books about all the places I've lived. First with his book about Paris, and then in this book of collected essays about New York, he captures with brilliance and eloquence all of the contradictory emotions places and spaces bring to their inhabitants. His accounts are incredibly moving, and this book in particular utilizes his childrens' growth as a metaphor for aging, loss, joy, and wonder. Though some of the selections are reprinted from pieces he published in The New Yorker, many of them were written expressly for this volume, including his tales of his first Thanksgivings back in New York, which punctuate the book and give a sense of the time period it belongs to. Particularly in these longer selections, Gopnik has a gift for weaving together disparate narratives, making them all speak to a single theme with a final flourish of beautifully drafted prose. Of course, part of the book's gravitas is provided by the time period it depicts: just before and in the years after 9/11. But Gopnik is not eager to make mileage of this event as much as he uses it to illustrate larger ideas about New York as a place and its citizens as a people. As a result his book feels like it will matter long beyond the years it chronicles and will speak to a far greater breadth of readers than those who inhabit the island of Manhattan. I can't recommend it enough.

Not really a 5-star book, but it gave me 5 stars' worth of pleasure—a fair amount of it related to the author's narration of the audiobook. His wisdom, heart, and humor shine throughout, as he reflects on rearing young children and, in general, on life in New York City in the early 2000s.