How to Be a Family: The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together Audiobook

Quotes

• “Highly entertaining and wryly insightful.”

  — Andrew Solomon, author of Far and Away

• “Kois is a self-aware, menschy, and amusing guide to this adventure, picking apart what you can leave behind, what you can pick up along the way, and what will follow you wherever you are.”

  — Vogue

• “This book shows how one family works, as a way of helping us all ask ourselves: How might (and ought) our own families best function?…Discuss this book with people you care about, who also care about you.”

  — Los Angeles Times

• “Refreshingly relatable.”

  — Outside magazine

• “A hilarious and honest book about how wherever you (and your kids) go, there you (and their screens) are.”

  — Real Simple

• New York Times' Best Holiday Books of 2019New York Post's Awesome Books for the HolidaysBookpage's Best Lighthearted Nonfiction of 2019A BookRiot New Nonfiction Release to Add to Your NightstandIncluded in Buzzfeed's Holiday Gift GuideFeatured in Entertainment Weekly's Best Holiday Books

• Borrows a page from Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love....this book is an antidote to the documentarian approach that now pervades much travel writing.

  — Monica Drake, New York Times Book Review

• This book shows how one family works, as a way of helping us all ask ourselves: How might (and ought) our own families best function? ... Discuss this book with people you care about, who also care about you.

  — Los Angeles Times

• Kois is a self-aware, menschy, and amusing guide to this adventure, picking apart what you can leave behind, what you can pick up along the way, and what will follow you wherever you are.

  — Vogue

• A hilarious and honest book about how wherever you (and your kids) go, there you (and their screens) are.

  — Real Simple

• An impressive body of research.

  — The New York Times

• An illuminating story of family connection in the digital age.

  — Entertainment Weekly

• "Kois and his family actually take the dizzying leap to leave behind their lives for a year-a trek that takes them from New Zealand to Kansas-and the result is a unique book that every overstressed and anxious (meaning = every) parent should read.

  — The Millions

• Kois, an editor at Slate, made a project of exploring what living in other cultures-in this case, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and Kansas-could teach [his family] about becoming closer. The result is his heartwarming memoir.

  — The Washingtonian

• Might remind cinema-minded readers of the end of Bill Forsyth's 1983 film Local Hero...nicely tuned-in observations befitting a keen-eyed journalist.

  — Kirkus

• In thishighly entertaining and wryly insightful book, Dan Kois shows how elastic the very concept of family is. As he recounts his family's encounters with four foreign cultures, he illuminates not only those other societies, but also our own. He argues persuasively that we have much to learn from divorcing ourselves from our own assumptions.

  — Andrew Solomon, author of Far and Away and Far From the Tree

• Lots of people talk about pulling up stakes and traveling for a year. Dan Kois and his family actually did it. He's funny and honest about how it all turned out.

  — Pamela Druckerman, author of Bringing Up Bébé and There Are No Grown-Ups

• This sometimes hair-raising adventure in family togetherness across many continents took courage even to attempt, and a lively sense of humor to describe. Kois has produced a delightful and eye-opening book about what it means to be a family in the modern world.

  — Ian Frazier, author of Family and Coyote V Acme

• Many parents will relate to the experiences in this book of trying to get your kids to do stuff. Dan gives us some hope that we can ask our kids to do hard things, to adapt to new challenges, and it can be good for everyone. Also, the book is wildly entertaining.

  — Emily Oster, author of Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool

• As many parents know, the key to making a family work is: Put in the time. Dan Kois and his wife took their two kids on the trip of a lifetime and learned what's great (and miserable) about how that time passes. The result is a funny, thoughtful, well-reported and inspiring guide for anyone hoping to create family adventures (and misadventures) of their own.

  — Charles Duhigg, bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better