You should read it Edam. I know that there is far too much scare mongering in this area and alot of mum bashing - I'm always ready for a bit of argie bargie in that area, on the mums side of course, but I didn't find that to be the case with this book. It's inevitable that someone in the media will misquote or misrepresent certain passages to be sure - the debate has policy issues and expensive ones at that so there'll always be snipers. I didn't really understand Acnebride's comments. If the celebrity case study was the Billy Connelly one, I'd say it was a misjudgement to include it - it was certainly incongruous beside all the other case studies but I just as certainly didn't find the conclusions tendentious simply because of it. It's a really well presented argument, there is some incongruence like I said - she has a pop at Steven Pinker for instance, which was a bit..well that was tendentious. I don't think the point was to frighten people away from nurseries, but rather in the Polly Toynbee tradition, to lobby for more resourses for all children of nursery age.