Rickles' Book will make you love one of the great Americans of our time, Don Rickles. Why you need to buy Rickles' Book immediately: Rickles' Book will help you win friends and influence people. Rickles' Book will introduce you to all of his famous friends, from Frank Sinatra to Johnny Carson. Rickles' Book will help you lose weight. Rickles' Book will help you gain weight. Rickles' Book will improve your love life. Rickles' Book will make you cry (If your love life doesn't improve). Rickles' Book will make you laugh (If your love life does improve). Rickles' Book will make you love one of the great Americans of our time, Don Rickles. Rickles' Book will give you something to talk about at parties (If you're ever invited to parties). Rickles' Book , along with the Bible and War and Peace , will grace your bookshelf and upgrade your literary status. Rickles' Book will keep you up at night. Rickles' Book will put you to sleep at night. Rickles' Book will make you rich (If you treasure great humor).

On the surface, David Baddiel's childhood was fairly standard: a lower-middle-class Jewish family living in an ordinary house in Dollis Hill, north-west London. But David came to realise that his mother was in fact not ordinary at all. Having escaped extermination by fleeing Nazi Germany as a child, she was desperate to make her life count, which took the form of a passionate, decades-long affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman. Meanwhile, as Baddiel investigates his family's past, his father's memories are fading; dementia is making him moodier and more disinhibited, with an even greater penchant for obscenity. As with his mother's affair, there is both comedy and poignancy to be found: laughter is a constant presence, capable of transforming the darkest of experiences into something redemptive.