Levar Burton Reads Go the F**k to Sleep Live!
Warning: Strong language ahead! Not everyone will appreciate this book or its reading, but for many of us parent whose children rarely sleep or don’t sleep well, this is the book of our generation.
Go the Fuck to Sleep is the book that I lived for years, until Trazadone let my daughter sleep through the night without rolling across the floor or eloping from the house at 3am only to be brought home by the local police.
Years of being woken up to clean poop and just be with an autistic child who couldn’t quite her mind or body, and I didn’t even know about this book!
Levar Burton of Star Trek and Reading Rainbow fame recently read the book for charity. Some of his emphasis makes it pretty clear that he’s been a parent in the situation written by the book’s author,
Apparently Burton is not the only actor to have read it. Samuel L. Jackson has made the internet even better with his reading of the book, available at audible. The written reviews on that page are just as funny as the book.
Here are some of the big media reviews for the book.
“Nothing has driven home a certain truth about my generation, which is approaching the apex of its childbearing years, quite like this.”
—The New Yorker
“A parenting zeitgeist”
—Washington Post
“A hilarious take on that age-old problem: getting the beloved child to go to sleep.”
–National Public Radio
“A new Bible for weary parents”
—New York Times
“Resonates powerfully with almost everyone”
—Boston Globe
“Go the F*** to Sleep challenges stereotypes, opens up prototypes, and acknowledges that shared sense of failure that comes to all parents who weary of ever getting their darling(s) to sleep and briefly resuming the illusion of a life of their own.”
—Midwest Book Review
Go the F*** to Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don’t always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. Profane, affectionate, and radically honest, California Book Award-winning author Adam Mansbach’s verses perfectly capture the familiar–and unspoken–tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night. In the process, they open up a conversation about parenting, granting us permission to admit our frustrations, and laugh at their absurdity.
With illustrations by Ricardo Cortes, Go the F*** to Sleep is beautiful, subversive, and pants-wettingly funny–a book for parents new, old, and expectant. You probably should not read it to your children.
Seriously, Just Go to Sleep, a children’s book inspired by Go the F*** to Sleep and appropriate for kids of all ages, is forthcoming from Akashic Books in April 2012 and available NOW for pre-order.
