The resilience of kids is a byword, but at the age of eight Kevin Sweeney came up with a novel way of dealing with the loss of his father. He decided to choose three men to be his surrogate dads--without telling them, he'd observe and emulate them. A terrific premise, but alas this book doesn't deliver quite as much as it promises. It's still an occasionally touching look at a hardscrabble San Francisco Irish childhood.

Sweeney explains in the introduction that the book grew out of an essay he wrote for Salon in 2001. (The original essay says he was 7 when he came up with his plan; presumably he subsequently found the correct age in the journal he kept.) The deaths of many young fathers on 9/11 prompted him to think about his coping strategy, and he wanted both to reassure families left fatherless and to encourage other men to be role models. I just read that essay, and it's wonderful. Unfortunately, the book doesn't very succesfully flesh out the essay, and what's been added to pad it out to full length is just not as compelling as the original.

Memoirs are as thick as dandelions these days. If the author's not a household name, doesn't have a truly compelling and unusual story to tell, or doesn't write like an angel, it's tough for yet another autobiography to stand out. The Sweeneys are averagely interesting people with an averagely interesting story; what's compelling is Kevin's idea, but we don't learn much about what prompted him to come up with it. He describes being eight years old, lying in bed and worrying that he won't know how to be a good father, a good man, because he doesn't have "the classic reference point--my old man." Isn't that in itself a rather remarkable train of thought for an eight-year-old? But as an adult, Sweeney has difficulty reconnecting enough with his child self to explain it to us. "My scheme had a formality and simplicity that makes me wonder now about why I felt this need so clearly," he says. The idea was his first journal entry, but reading one's old journals can sometimes be like reading that of a stranger's--it isn't always possible to reconstruct the self who wrote them.