Don't Make Me Stop This Car!: Adventures in Fatherhood - Hardcover

Al Roker, the genial weatherman on NBC's top-rated Today show, has written a book that reads like a long chat over coffee. Light and involving, Don't Make Me Stop This Car talks frankly about fertility problems, parenting, divorce, adoption, and... 'toons. It turns out that Roker's a cartoon fanatic, and his own capable, funny drawings grace the back cover and chapter headings. In the first half of Don't Make Me Stop This Car, Roker and his wife, 20/20 correspondent Deborah Roberts, struggle to get pregnant. They conceive a child the old-fashioned way but lose it during the first trimester. Roker candidly discusses the causes of their impaired fertility: his low sperm count and his wife's plummeting progesterone levels. Key doctors are introduced (and, annoyingly, reintroduced) in the ensuing chapters before Leila is delivered via C-section in November 1998. Part two is a collection of essays on topics ranging in seriousness from Ricky Martin to racism. Roker's better with weightier subjects, such as the challenges and pleasures of adoption and foster care. And there are some compelling descriptions of his childhood that make you admire his salt-of-the-earth parents. At times the writing sounds as if Roker dictated and didn't spend much time editing. It's punctuated by exclamations that surely sound better on TV ("Yesss!" "Is this a great country, or what?" "Gotta go!"). But the informality grows less irritating as the book goes on. Ultimately, you're left with a sense of Roker as a middle-class hero--proud of his bus-driver dad but rich enough to buy fertility treatments and then decorate the baby's nursery with trinkets from the "statusphere." All in all, it's a sunny forecast for Mr. Roker's fatherhood book. --Kathi Inman Berens

Al Roker began his broadcasting career while in college, landing a job as a weekend weatherman at WTVH-TV in Syracuse, New York. After stops in Washington, D.C., and Cleveland, Ohio, he began working at NBC in 1983. He lives in New York City with his wife, ABC News 20/20 correspondent Deborah Roberts, and their two daughters.