The Uncle Book: Everything You Need to Know to Be a Kid's Favorite Relative

by Jesse Cogan

A delightful guide to the joys and responsibilities of being an uncle

There are more uncles than there are parents, more nieces and nephews than there are daughters and sons. Now, in The Uncle Book , Cogan has written a charming and instructive guide to handling the joys and responsibilities of being an uncle. Organized in an easy-to-browse format, it includes helpful sections on everything from changing diapers to childproofing your apartment, profiles of celebrity uncles, plus the ins and outs of planning birthday parties, playing Nintendo, and much more.

With its wealth of information, insights and expert advice, The Uncle Book will lend support to nervous, new uncles as well as inspire experienced ones, and help to strengthen relationships between children and their uncles everywhere.

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Natalie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book thinking I might get some good ideas on how to be a better aunt because I thought, how different are the roles, really? The author is pretty set on traditional gender roles and sees the roles of aunts and uncles as very different. I found this annoying at times. That said, the book did get me thinking about how the roles of uncles (and aunts) are not clearly defined, so it comes down to what I want to do and make of it. In addition, the author is clearly an awesome uncle who really cares about his nieces and nephews!

[Vlad · Rating 1 out of 5]

Two Word Summary: Repetitive & Disorganized

This book manages to say the same thing 50 times while also sprinkling nuggets of useless tales through out for you to discover. The book was ALL over the place and it was littered with bad advice. The author acted as if any and all your bad behaviors, bad personality traits and shortcomings had absolutely 0 impact on the kids.

Essentially take no responsibility for how you think or act guys because guess what “You’re an Uncle!” 🤡

I do appreciate the fact that the author at least tried to cater to Uncles in his writing of this book. Seeing as he stated there is a shortage of books on this subject. And his tone certainly made it seem like he had good intentions. But this book is a huge miss. It could have been 40 pages and it would have still gotten whatever message it was trying to get across. Instead it was more than double that and an absolute chore to slug through.

The best part about this book was the mere fact of what it meant that I was reading it. In other words my greatest joy came from the constant knowing that there is a little one on the way whom I can already begin to love and care for.

Apart from that incredible delight (which in some ways simply reading the cover could have provided) I would not recommend this book. My head was hurting out of pure confusion of what I just read. I was left discombobulated after my reading sessions of this and I couldn’t wait to be done with it.

The short length, fact that it was a gift, my strong dislike for not finishing things and my thoughts of the little one to come are what got me through reading this. But if not for all 4 of those, I would not have made it past page 20, if that.

Congrats to all you Uncles out there, treat them better than you'd want to be treated!! 🥳 ✨

[Jared · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was pretty excited to read this book when I found out I was going to be an uncle and there just isn't too much literature out there on the topic. There were elements of this book that got me even more excited for the rule, and highlighted important differences between how a kid sees their uncle vs parents and the way I can be a respite from a more important but more stressful parent child relationship. It was a little weird that the book felt like it was written for children, and had some questionable gender role affirming portions, as well as a surprising amount of copaganda, frequently using cops as an example for a point he was trying to make and pretending like they actually accomplish anything in their line of work. Overall, it was a mixed bag, hence the 3 stars, but I so far haven't found any other books on how to be an uncle despite how many there are written about parenting.

[Adrien · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretty obvious advice on this book.

[Scott Gardner · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wasn't too impressed with these words of wisdom