Books: Laughing Gas

RAISING A RIOT (244 pp.)—Alfred Toombs—Crowell ($3).

“You men! You think you’re so smart. I’d just like to see you try to take care of a house and kids.”

That anguished cry of womankind has echoed down the ages of this man’s world, and the wise guys of every age have found that it pays to sympathize. Author Toombs has sympathized so shrewdly in Raising a Riot that he is likely to be paid plenty in royalties.

Toombs is an ex-newsman whose wife took ill and left him to care for their three children. If there is a word of truth in Raising a Riot, Toombs ran about like a chicken with its head off for 18 months—a spectacle that may weary some readers after 18 pages—and finished every day feeling like “an egg dropped on concrete.”

After reducing himself to an object as piteous and work-ridden as an aged charwoman’s knee, Toombs wails an old refrain: “Waking up in the morning is the worst mistake that a housekeeper can make. You have the awful feeling that you are in debt to the day . . . Housekeeping [is] certainly the hardest job I . . . ever tackled.”

Crowell is the same publisher who brought out Cheaper by the Dozen (TIME,, June 13), another tale of life with father, which was a surprise bestseller last spring. With full publicity behind it, Riot could easily sell almost as well. Yet the book has little of Dozen’s natural air of comedy in it; it relies on carefully measured doses of laughing gas, slightly under pressure.