[Cheaper by the Dozen] is a boisterous, breezy family chronicle, the true story—the more incredible for being true—of how an inventive and immensely capacious American engineer, Frank Bunker Gilbreth by name, and his game and surprisingly durable wife, Lillian Moller Gilbreth, raised their twelve children and kept unceasingly on the go…. I don't question the veracity of [the events in the book]; I just wish it sounded more like life. The story would be better were there more land...

The high standard of hilarity [in "Cheaper by the Dozen"] is kept up well, and great praise should be given the authors for their choice of anecdotes—of which, the reader feels sure, there must have been a large reservoir. There emerges, in a quietly accumulative way through the pages, a very lovable and loving mother…. And when Mr. Gilbreth's ideas embarrassed his children, which they did frequently, to the real misery of the sensitive adolescents, it was Mrs. Gilbreth&#x...

["Cheaper by the Dozen" is not] merely a remembrance of things past in a household geared to scientific management…. There is an abundance of data on the basic economy of operating a household of fourteen people. The big family is on the way out, if it isn't out already—a fact which makes "Cheaper by the Dozen," among other things, the case history of an anachronism. Which, of course, is no fault of the brother-sister authors. As story—as true story&#x...

["Cheaper by the Dozen"] is a gay and affectionate tribute to Frank B. Gilbreth, a latter-day [Clarence] Day…. One hilarious chapter follows another—mass instruction in the touch system of typing, wholesale removal of tonsils, family picnics that were something between an army encampment and a chautauqua.