Bringing Up Bébé (2012)

Why don't French children throw tantrums in restaurants? That's the question that gave birth to this hot new book, a study of French parenting by Pamela Druckerman, an American raising kids in Paris. Bringing Up Bébé is a fun read (ooh là là French tots eat meals in courses!), but Druckerman seems to draw all her anecdotal evidence from a mere handful of upper-middle-class Parisians. She's also too seduced by clichés to fully win over this mother of a bicultural bébé. My French husband never rushed me to slim down post-pregnancy, as the bedroom-eyed Frenchmen in her book do. And non, it's not just because we live in New York. B