SEATTLE/ Conservative Monitor -- Call it humorous, call it good advice, call it a fun book for anyone who has been a parent. Judy Gruen mixes just the right amounts of humor, honesty, earnestness and fact into her new book, "Carpool Tunnel Syndrome". It is a series of essays on parenting drawn from real life experiences and common sense.

Rather than reading Doctor Spock or consulting baby guides, parents should take a look at Judy's book. She addresses everything from how to deal with grocery shopping and the PTA to how to raise a respectable, decent human being.

Each of her essays is perceptively constructed, playing on various aspects of homelife with children. But behind the humor and the fascinating stories we find a moral crusader who is doing her own little bit to save the world from bad manners, crudity and self-indulgence. In a chapter called "Culture Mulcher Mom," she flays the ad industry's current movement toward the "cutting edge" and describes her own humorous, yet effective battle to keep skin and crudity off the billboards and off the radio dial.

More than a crusader, Judy Gruen shows herself to be a perceptive observer. Without being pointed or particularly partisan, she lampoons certain leftist notions about American Culture. About the differences between girls and boys she writes:

"When I was a young mother, I refused to buy my boys any toy guns or knives. Like a good student of the 1970s, I wanted to "give peace a chance" in my house. Ha! What a chump! Although my policy has not changed, and I still cannot bring myself to buy toy weapons, my efforts have been for naught. My boys have created toy guns when they needed them out of whatever materials happened to be around the house...So, if you persist in maintaining that you can socialize boys to subsume their naturally occurring, testosterone-driven swashbuckling and not buy them toy guns, go ahead: Make my day."

She is especially funny and spot-on when she addresses the relationship between husband and wife. In a chapter about her quest for a bigger house for a group of four growing children, her husband committed the greatest error that a husband may:

"Now, if husbands really have a death wish, I can think of other ways to indulge it, such as hang gliding, a trek to Mount Fuji, or becoming a soldier of fortune. There, at least, they have a chance of emerging alive. But to buy a house without a wife's approval is perhaps the most reckless temptation of fate that I have ever heard of."

Mrs. Gruen's style is light and breezy and achieves its humor by taking serious subjects and applying to it some of the absurdity of reality and then underplaying the absurdity as if it were only one more fact to be laid out in an earnest effort to impart sound advice.

And her advice, indeed, is sound. As a guide to parenting or simply a collection of funny stories, "Carpool Tunnel Syndrome" is a fast and entertaining read. It is highly recommended by the staff at the Conservative Bookstore, who have passed it around among themselves, marking passages that say, "You've got to read this!"

- Highly Recommended ****