Today's recommended read: 'Please Don't Eat the Daisies' by Jean Kerr

Tales of the perils and pitfalls of raising a family are timeless, even if the rest of Jean Kerr's classic "Please Don't Eat the Daisies" is not.

Kerr, a playwright married to legendary New York Times drama critic Walter Kerr, published the essay collection detailing life with her four young sons in 1957. It was turned in to a movie in 1960, then a television series in 1965. You can skip those essays.

Kerr writes of one of her twins: "He has a lightness of touch that will certainly put him on top of the heap if he ever takes up safecracking." The title of the book comes from an instruction she wishes she had given the boys the day she was having people over for dinner. In "Aunt Jean's Marshmallow Fudge Diet," she takes on fad diets, and of magazines' pushing the misguided belief that by becoming svelte, a woman will drive men mad with desire: "What actually holds a husband through thick and thick is a girl who is fun to be with. And any girl who has had nothing to eat since nine o'clock this morning but three hard-boiled eggs will be about as jolly and companionable as an income-tax inspector."

For extra credit: Google "The Poet and the Peasants," from the collection "Penny Candy," for her take on trying to instill some culture in her rambunctious clan.