cover image 12,000 MILES IN THE NICK OF TIME: A Semi-Dysfunctional Family Circumnavigates the Globe

12,000 MILES IN THE NICK OF TIME: A Semi-Dysfunctional Family Circumnavigates the Globe

Mark Jacobson, . . Atlantic Monthly, $24 (271pp) ISBN 978-0-87113-852-1

American pop culture has decimated a formerly rich civilization and left in its evil, McDonald's/TV/CD–driven wake zombified kids and adults with unrefined tastes. So asserts former Village Voice writer Jacobson in this self-congratulatory treatise on how to save one's children from pop-promulgated perdition while also bonding as a family. A parental how-to for upwardly mobile hipsters, the book has no Dr. Phil "just sit down and talk" attack plan. Rather, Jacobson promotes a kind of intellectual Outward Bound program to get one's kids into "The World" and, consequently, another way of thinking. In 2000, Jacobson, his wife and three kids (aged 16, 12 and nine) left cushy Park Slope, Brooklyn, and spent three months traipsing through Asia, the Middle East, England and France. They witnessed funeral pyres burning on the Ganges, Cambodia's Pol Pot museum, religious infighting in Jerusalem, Giza's pyramids and other phenomenal sights. Throughout, Jacobson muses on the meaning of life, in language alternately way cool and smugly anachronistic. An epilogue by his eldest daughter (who's now a college dropout) gives no sense that the trip imparted the meaning her father had envisioned. Alas, the Jacobsons are never true participants on their travels, but mostly voyeurs on an experiential voyage. The book's elitist tone and commentary may leave some readers feeling insulted and perhaps somehow lacking (if they are trying to provide for their children what Jacobson's privileged trio were born to).The irony in Jacobson's memoir is its resemblance to a reality TV series: lots of tell-all revelation with little insight. Agent, Philippa Brophy. (July)