Resources: Review - A repetitive joke with a serious message onadulthood

Big Babies: Or Why Can't We Just Grow Up? By Michael Bywater Published by Granta Books 262 pages Price 14.99 ISBN 13: 978-1-86207-883-3

Those familiar with the TV programme Grumpy Old Men will have a shrewd idea of what awaits them after the first few pages. The TV variant offers a collection of tired boorish celebrities sounding off. Basically they don't like 'modern life' and tell you why. Paid by the joke, one assumes, they strain to be amusing - some succeed some of the time, but mostly they merely remind you of the golf-club bore. Be warned that this book also veers off in all directions and is often as cliched, tiresome and repetitive as the TV programme. However, it has a saving grace - it is motivated by the author's desire to lay before us a serious idea with significance as to how we view education.