This was a thought-provoking read. Not all of the chapters, many of which had been essays written for the New Yorker, were equally of interest to me, but the overall theme of the birth of ideas was very interesting. Things that we take for granted as givens, like the idea of adolescence as a stage of life-it's good to be reminded that those ideas had a beginning, sometimes strange ones with unlikely (and sometimes really horrible) folks promoting them. Even the people who were proponents of the most wonderful things, like children's libraries, were complicated.

Reading this book got me thinking a lot about ideas and what we take for granted. It made me wonder what people 100 years in the future, or even 50 years in the future, will think about us—our political battles, our religious beliefs, how we raise families, how we approach life and death(which is the focus of this book, although I think it would be a better description to say it's about our approaches to the stages of life).

The introduction, a short history of board games—specifically about games that mimic life: the titular Mansion of Happiness, the Game of Life, and many others—sets up the structure for the book. The chapters are a progression of life's stages and moments in history that formed pervading ideas about these stages. The Children's Room, about the origin of children's libraries and more widespread attention being shown to children's literature, was the chapter I enjoyed the most.

This book is not really 320 pages long. It's 192 pages, and the rest of the pages are mostly endnotes. I’m glad she so thoroughly documented her sources, but I wish she had done footnotes rather than endnotes. I can't see a little number at the end of a sentence and ignore it, so I did a lot of flipping back and forth.

My rating is really closer to 3.5 stars, but the book did get my brain working, and it was definitely worth my time. ( )

Just a note that a lot of this book was previously published in the New Yorker, so will not be new to longtime readers. It's more of a collection of pieces than a cohesive whole, but the essays themselves are interesting. ( )

A beautiful, bizarre, rambling history of life stages. ( )

Really 3 1/2 stars. Not quite the tour-de-force the reviews led me to believe it was. Interesting, but disconnected. ( )

Some interesting stories in this book, but at times a bit dry. ( )