Making you a part of one family's immediate existence as no other book quite does, this novel is a study of the savage warfare between Henrietta and her husband Sam, an impractical idealist who has nearly brought his family to ruin. It also tells the story of the children who, growing up in an increasingly bizarre household, try to escape damage. Henrietta, privileged and sheltered, expected a smoothly comfortable society life in Washington when she married Sam Pollitt, a handsome self-made biologist. Ten years later, Henny is a skinny, screaming drudge with five children, a raging wreck of a woman driven by "hate, horror, passion or contempt." But Sam, whose impractical idealism has brought his family to near-ruin, is unchanged: still at sea in all adult affairs, an absurd hypocritical buffoon but a genius with children . . . except Louie, his eldest daughter, an ugly brilliant adolescent who is forced to take a drastic, final step to save herself and the children from lasting tragedy. "The Man Who Loved Children "is an astonishing account of the decline of an American bourgeois family. Intimate, accurate and savagely funny, it is also unforgettably moving.