Gander at the Gate is the best book of its kind since Twenty Years A-Growing. It is vibrant, humorous, delightful, nostalgic and deeply moving to the point of tears ... The characters are wonderful, especially Uncle Jack, who deserves a book to himself sometime. This is a book full of the magical lunacies of a family and it is also a history of a troubled time in which the author's father was a major figure ... I shall read it again and again.