by Bill Cosby
Doubleday
With his colourful sweaters and beaming smile, Bill Cosby can seem too chummy for comfort - like your dad trying to be funny. But this book themed on family recollections proves how hilarious he could be in his heyday.
"One day when he was reading in the living room, my brother and I decided we could play basketball without breaking anything," Cosby writes, paving the way for the first twist in a typically wicked joke. "When I took a shot that redesigned the glass table, my mother … said, 'So help me, I'll bust you in half.' Without lifting his head from his book, my father said, 'Why would you want twice as many?'"
It could be said that Fatherhood amounts to a grab-bag of Cosby's stand-up material, but the standard is so high it's tempting to give him a pass. Certainly, readers did at the time: Fatherhood was one of the fastest-selling hardcover books ever.
The father of five displays an intimate grasp of parenting rituals and pitfalls combined with a knack for milking every last drop of humour from a situation. For example, there's the joke about the flow of money between generations.
During his youth, he writes, when he asked his father for 50 cents, his father would tell him how, in his childhood, he rose at 4am and walked 23 miles to milk 90 cows. Worse, the farmer he worked for had no bucket, so Cosby's father had to squirt the milk into his hand then walk eight miles to the nearest can. All for five cents a month.