Nine Subin, Viking Press

Keith Gessen, author of “Raising Raffi: The First Five Years.”

There are a lot of parenting books out there, but there are probably not a lot of them like the one written by Keith Gessen.

So many parenting books are advice about this, or suggestions about that — and Gessen's is neither of those things

Gessen says he wrote the book out of desperation. For the first few months of his son’s life, he was merely surviving. “Raising Raffi: The First Five Years” is what came out of that experience.

The Show spoke with Gessen about prompted him to write this kind of book, which he says in an honest appraisal of him as a soon-to-be-parent and then as a parent.

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