Know Anyone Who Is Pregnant? Have I Got A Book for You!

Posted April 27, 2010. Know anyone who is having a baby? More specifically, know anyone who is having a baby who wants the man in her life to get more involved in the pregnancy and childbirth? Have I got a book for you! It's the virtually new, completely updated second edition of The Everything Father to Be Book, A Survival Guide for Men, by yours truly.

     The book is for men, written from the point of view of a man who has been a pregnant father four times. It was first published in 2004, and it was such a winner that Adams Media, the publisher, decided to put out a revised edition in 2010. I did the rewrites late last year, adding some new info and features and updating the material where needed. Interestingly, pregnancy and childbirth haven't changed all that much in the past half-dozen years, but the technology of our every day lives, such as the use of cell phones, has changed remarkably.

     In the 2004 edition I advised fathers to bring lots of dimes with them to the hospital so that after the baby was born, they could call their family and friends on the pay phone down the hall to tell them the big news. Of course, pay phones barely exist now and there is no longer any need for men to carry dimes with them because they all have cells. The one kicker is that many hospitals do not allow people to use cells inside the building, so they have to go outside to call.

     The sparkling second edition of The Everything Father to Be Book, A Survival Guide for Men is now available for sale here at KevinNelsonWriter.com. Amazon and Barnes & Noble online don't have it in stock yet, nor do bookstores. But it will arrive in these places soon.

More news on the literary front: The other day I was chatting with one of the grand men of California publishing, Malcolm Margolin of Heyday Books. Malcolm has published two of my books, Wheels of Change: From Zero to 600 MPH: The Amazing Story of California and the Automobile and The Golden Game. I was pitching him on doing an airplane book or maybe even one on mountain climbing. 

     So Malcolm, who has a long gorgeous gray beard that Walt Whitman would have envied, noted what others have noted as well: that I seemed to have attention deficit disorder when it comes to my writing. "It's interesting," he said thoughtfully. "Though I'm not sure it's best strategy."

     Really, why would Malcolm think such a thing? I have a new book on fatherhood out. My last book was on cars. The one before that was on forgery and true crime, and the one before that on baseball. And now I'm tossing out ideas on airplanes and mountain climbing and thinking, quite seriously, that what I really should be blogging about these days is beer.

     Speaking of that car book, Paul Kilduff of The Monthly did an entertaining interview with me that you can read and listen to here. And Bill Millard, historian at the California Automobile Museum in Sacramento, called Wheels of Change "a helluva fun read—a wonderful effort" [that covers] "a gigantic subject in a very neat, readable package. It deserves a prominent place among the standard references on California's history."