Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York

Written by Adam Gopnik

Narrated by Adam Gopnik

By turns elegant and exultant, jubilant and poignant, Through the Children's Gate is a loving portrait of a family and their city.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: Sep 25, 2006
• ISBN: 9781598872705

Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik has been writing for the New Yorker since 1986. He is a three-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays and for Criticism, and the George Polk Award for magazine reporting. From 1995 to 2000 he lived in Paris; he now lives in New York City with his wife and their two children.

Reviews for Through the Children's Gate

[othemts · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This collection of essays documents Gopnik's life upon returning to New York City with his wife and young children after living in Paris. The September 11th attacks occur shortly after they move in and they color a lot of the stories in this book. There are humorous bits about Gopnik's therapist, who he believes to be the last Freudian, and his daughter's imaginary friend who is so very New York that he's always too busy to play with her. The most touching story is about Gopnik's friend who is an art historian and football coach and how he spends his final months before dying of cancer presenting lecture's at Washington's National Gallery and coaching Gopnik's son's flag football team. Gopnik has a talent of spinning out a lot of ideas from a small observation, but he also has a proclivity towards white, upper middle class navel gazing. It's a fine edge and he doesn't always land on the right side.

[annbury_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a wonderful book. Gopnik writes knowingly about why mothers in NYC have become so child-centered (it is the latest fad, plus the effects of 9/11) and about Kirk Varnedoe, the modern art and sculpture curator at MOMA, who was also a wonderful trainer of kids in football. I did not know that when Varnedoe did his first exhibition at MOMA Gopnik was his collaborator. The exhibit, called High and Low, was about the many connections between low culture, such as comics and advertising, and high culture, such as painting, and was typical of Varnedoe in that it excited a lot of crazed opposition, including that of Hilton Kramer. There are many exciting things in this book, including stories of restaurants, (Gopnik is a major league cook) and children growing up in NY and the Yankees.

[russellbittner · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

J. P. Donleavy once wrote a hilarious novel titled A Fairy Tale of New York. Adam Gopnik's masterpiece could be just as aptly titled. He has, however, chosen a somewhat more prosaic title while letting the content of his non-fiction work read very much like the title of Donleavy's opus.

While Gopnik's story is solidly a New York story (of both the people and the place), it's equally a story about bringing up children in "the city that never sleeps" (even if they do). Whether the city itself contributes in a measurable way to their development is, of course, anyone's guess. It could well be that with their privileged genetic inheritance, they were simply meant to become the extraordinary children the author makes them out to be. But Adam Gopnik, himself, has no doubt played a critical role in their development, and we have him to thank and admire for the end result.

As a parent, myself, of two rather creative children, I felt (and feel) a certain kinship with Adam Gopnik and fully expect our progeny to one day share a communal spotlight.

In the meantime, I thank him for an extraordinary read. It has been a long time since I could honestly say of a book that I didn't want it to end. I say that now without qualification about Through the Children's Gate and urge not only would-be parents, but also appreciative readers to open their eyes, minds and hearts to this gift of a book.

RRB
10/11/12

[lukespapa · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Through the Children’s Gate continues the author’s story of his family which began with Paris to the Moon where the NYC-based writer and wife moved to raise their toddler son in the surrounds of Luxembourg Gardens. Now, five years later and just prior to 9/11, the family has relocated back to New York City, and to be specific, Manhattan. However, unlike the first book, the precocious children (a daughter had since been born) seem more peripheral than central to this memoir. Nonetheless, the LOL imbroglio with his son encapsulates the author’s experience on parenting and his poignant coda on that situation exemplifies optimism in the face of life’s misunderstandings. Like the earlier work, Gopnik’s perceptive and lucid writing offers an accessible intellectuality that leaves the reader feeling clever for having read the book.

[marliesd_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Some of the essays, especially the first one, are a little hard going, but overall, a very nice book about New York and raising children there. You will especially love the stories about Olivia and her imaginary friend.

[debnance_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Gopnik and his wife decide to move with their family from Paris back home to New York City. The chapters of the book consist of little stories about Gopnik’s kids, about life in New York City after living in Paris, about New York after 9-11. The subject of the chapters is not important. Gopnik has a way of writing so well, so thoughtfully, that the real subject is clearly living itself. Trying to battle what Gopnik calls “the screens,” the video and computer and game screens that have taken over the lives of Gopnik’s children and all American children, was the chapter that hit closest to my heart.

[janey47 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.