Confessions of a Slacker MomMuffy Mead-FerroDaCapo/LifeLong: 138...

Confessions of a Slacker Mom

Muffy Mead-Ferro

DaCapo/LifeLong: 138 pp., $12.95 paper

“Confessions” is the latest and funniest in a series of parenting backlash books that one hopes signals the end to the suffocating over-parenting of the 1980s and ‘90s. “Like I need a smart baby,” Mead-Ferro muttered when she heard about the abdomen headphones that would supposedly stimulate her daughter’s intellect in utero. “I haven’t bought into our culture’s obsession with bodily cleanliness,” she admits, “and I’ve outright ignored the anti-bacterial soap fad.”

Mead-Ferro, an ad copywriter, grew up on a cattle ranch in Wyoming. Much of her wisdom comes from her mother, who died at 61 in the saddle. Mead-Ferro comes from a long line of non-slackers, from her Olympic gold-medal skiing grandma to her high school-educated grandfather, who was a governor of Wyoming and later a U.S. senator. She’s not going to let a bunch of marketing executives tell her how to raise her children (one chapter is titled “Toys Aren’t Us”).

The author’s extra-dry Wyoming sarcasm (which puts New Yorkers to shame) is reserved for such Martha Stewart-style excesses as scrapbooking, parties where moms get together to paste pictures of their little darlings in scrapbooks. (For a fleeting moment Mead-Ferro wonders if she could paste her children’s heads on digital photographs of other children or worse yet, if she could simply hire someone to do it for her.)

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Scouting for Boys

The Original 1908 Edition

Robert Baden-Powell

Oxford University Press: 380 pp., $26

Robert BADEN-POWELL, founder of the Boy Scouts, published this book in 1908 in a “period of wavering imperial confidence” after the Boer War. From 1908 until the early 1940s, its sales in Britain were exceeded only by the Bible. The underlying message of the book and the movement was, in Baden-Powell’s words, to allow boys, particularly those cooped up in urban and suburban areas, to “get on with things, find a ‘backwoods’ for themselves, and go adventuring.”

As a manifesto, “Scouting for Boys” has many faults, including rabid nationalism and bizarre, obsessive sections on personal hygiene. But the book was written in the spirit of Peter Pan and Kipling’s Kim; the games and plays and campfire stories are full of good ideas and good fun. The chapters on tracking, woodcraft, camp life and chivalry are full of simple (sometimes lifesaving) bits of practical information and exercises that teach children how to be observant, courteous and innovative.

Baden-Powell’s life would make a terrific movie: a conflicted, fierce boy-man who, unlike his brothers, was rejected at Oxford and instead commissioned into the 13th Hussars, stationed at Lucknow in India. From there, as a lieutenant, he traveled all over the world, all the while writing books on tracking and hunting. Baden-Powell believed that contact with nature could make gentlemen out of mere mortals. He was made a peer in 1929 and given the Royal Order of Merit in 1937. He died in 1941.

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Shelf Life

Romance, Mystery, Drama, and Other Page-Turning Adventures From a Year in a Bookstore

Suzanne Strempek Shea

Beacon Press: 224 pp., $20

“I am now an author working in a bookstore,” writes Shea of her three years working at Edwards Books in Springfield, Mass. “I am a spy from another land.” A reader must decide for himself, but in the end, the frantic life of readings and author tours and explanations seems less appealing than life in this quiet family-run store, where the clerks double as psychotherapists and the friendships made are just as real as the sacred object itself. (Shea notices that people tend to carry books close to their chests, like babies.)

In a country of 25,000 bookstores, Shea counts maybe 300 “truly outstanding stores.” “Shelf Life” has much the same feel as a browse through a bookstore; the digressions, the snippets of conversation, the lure of new titles and the possibility of information that could change a life.