Growing Up Funny

Since life has been a little stressful lately, I cheered myself up by checking out Childhood by Bill Cosby from the library.

I was expecting something full of tall tales and grossly exaggerated stories but Childhood seems to be a fairly realistic autobiography about growing up in the projects of Philadelphia, roughly from the ages of 10 to 13.  Cosby is pretty blunt about topics such as his father's drinking, but he manages to make stories like those about sharing a bed with his incontinent little brother and his mother's attempt to cure him of asthma via voodoo really funny.  The friends who were staples of his comedy routines and cartoons, Fat Albert et al, are featured characters; the tale of the Halloween night they threw a bedspread over a small car, picked it up, and ran off with it is hysterical, as are their attempts to ingratiate themselves with the opposite sex.  Cosby also inserts anecdotes about his own children (4 girls and a boy); if he was ever the recipient of The Mother's Curse ("I hope you grow up to have children just like you!"), it appears to have landed right on target.

Childhood is humorous and nostalgic, and almost sure to provide you with at least one wince about your own pre-adolescent follies.

"I never once said I was bored; children began to be bored only in July of 1963." ~Bill Cosby, Childhood