More on Caitlin Flanagan

My blood pressure drugs are at the ready: the Caitlin Flanagan book I mentioned a couple of weeks ago looks to be an revisiting of her incendiary columns from the last couple of years. The promotional material for the book is already up (PDF, pages 12 and 13), and I should thank Maud Newton for pointing to that (and offering a splendid anti-Flanagan posting).

In short, it looks like the book should largely by a retread of Flanagan's past writing, which means we probably haven't heard the last of her most offensive work (on the Nanny Wars) and we'll probably be treated to some other golden oldies.

I have been holding out some hope -- given Flanagan's generally restrained writing for the New Yorker -- that Flanagan's book would be a wickedly smart analysis of all of the different pushes and pulls that make up modern parenthood, rather than a wickedly smart (and generally misguided) assault on women who have made choices different from her. But I get the feeling that hope will be dashed.

(I'll stop here. My other fear is that this book will receive oodles of attention -- the first and biggest Mommy Wars book of '06 -- so I'll end up revisiting this again. So will a million other bloggers. My promise to you, the reader, is to do my best to keep the Flanagan posts reasonable, with a focus on Flanagan's huge blind spot: the modern father.)