Noah's Ark!

Our book today is from 1977: Peter Spier's incredible Caldecott Medal-winning picture book Noah's Ark. Since we've already covered at great length (indeed, is there any other kind of length?) here at Stevereads all the ways in which the very best so-called children's literature stands exactly equal with all other kinds of literature (and therefore needs no specialized pleading in order to appear here at all), we can skip right ahead to the book itself, which will almost certainly go down in Stevereads history as the least text ever to get reviewed here. Noah's Ark starts off (oddly - very, very oddly) with a fun little ditty about the ark written by the intensely hateful Dutch God-botherer Jacobus Revius ("Climb on board,/Said the Lord" etc.), but after that single page, the entire book has only two lines in it, one at the very beginning and one at the very end.

The one at the beginning is "...But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord" and comes before everything else in the book - before the title page, before the copyright information- a two-page spread juxtaposing the peace and bounty of Noah's home and farm with the warfare and bloodshed into which the rest of the world has descended.

After that, it's just page after page of Spier's incredibly detailed, deceptively brilliant pictures. We see the great ark being built (with a steadily-growing crowd of curious onlookers in the background), we see Noah and his simple, toiling family, and of course we see great crowds of animals, animals of every size and shape and description. Noah invites on board pigs and mice and bees and snails and butterflies. Sloths cling to the bellies of elephants, possums hang upside-down from the fur of camels, inchworms inch along (there's even a hopeful pair of dodos).

This isn't all a peaceful folk song, either: Spier gently but firmly reminds us that in addition to all the wicked humans in the world who perished when God's flood came, there were also countless other animal species, by definition innocent, who very much wanted a place on that ark and didn't get it:


The waters quickly and entirely cover the old man-dominated features of the landscape:


and then there's only the ark, in a vast expanse of water:


Spier delights in showing us the endless variety of chores and surprises on board during those forty days and forty nights. There's swabbing and cleaning and feeding and caring to be done, and the kindly Noah of these pictures also spares time to study and even to simply contemplate. Of course my favorite single panel in the book shows a late-night scene after one such busy, stressful day, when Noah rests at the candlelit table - in the company of the two species of animal who don't care about the flood and who would be on the ark with the man even if not a single drop of rain had fallen:


Eventually, the rains stop, the sun is seen again, and Noah sends out his famous dove to find flowering land. When the dove brings back its famous olive branch, it's cause for jubilation - Noah runs through the ark's various enclosures, waving the branch at his animal charges in happy triumph before feeding it to one of the cows (who've had, after all, no fresh grazing for forty days) - but before we see all that, Spier gives us a big quiet panel between husband and wife, as it dawns on them that their ordeal at sea might be coming to a close:


Only Christians could possibly be daft enough to view the story of Noah's ark as a parable about hope (the Jews rightly saw it for the catastrophic and probably useless cautionary tale that it is)(but then, the Jews see pretty much everything as a catastrophic and probably useless cautionary tale ... it's one of their many mordant charms) - they focus on that dove returning with its olive branch, rather than on the fact that God commits planetocide in a fit of pique. Noah finds favor in the eyes of the Lord, yes, but his experience clearly gives him Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, as his later behavior in Genesis clearly indicates. But that story has no place in Spier's colorful little book - except perhaps in his choice of that book's final line: "... and he planted a vineyard."

Bunny Redux!

Our books today take a second buck-toothed bite at the subject of bunny-centric kids books. In response to a deluge of emails (well, eight - but still....) from the silent majority, I've belatedly realized that what bunny books lack in zoological verisimilitude, they make up for in the near-psychotic enthusiasm they inspire in their fans, and I've been informed by a number of those fans (well, eight ...) that although I might have covered the three biggest, most popular, most influential bunny books here on Stevereads recently, I didn't do the subject full justice. So we're back for a quick P.S. before hopping on to other subjects.

I was sent many suggestions! Of the many bunny-books I cruelly neglected, however, three titles seemed to crop up on most of the lists I was sent, and that helps to narrow the field.

The earliest of these three titles is 1979's Bunnicula by Deborah and James Howe (with oddly appealing scratchy-line illustrations by Alan Daniel), the psychologically fraught story of what happens when the unsuspecting Monroe family brings home a bunny to keep as a pet. This ill-omened homecoming takes place on a dark and stormy night, and naturally the Monroe's two other pets - large, good-natured dog Harold and nervous, slightly spastic cat Chester - are curious. Harold, in his doglike way, placidly accepts the newcomer (at least, we're told this is doglike - having had a platoon of anal-retentive beagles in my life ... and now having a hyper-excitable pointer and a basset hound who is legally, medically certifiable, I wouldn't know first-hand), but Chester becomes convinced the bunny is in fact a vampire who intends to do in first
the Monroes - and then the world.

As all fans of Bunnicula will know - and as anybody who's ever met a cat will guess - it turns out the bunny is fairly harmless and that the real focus of the drama is how insane Chester is.



The bunny is also innocent in Mo Willems' great 1974 classic Knuffle Bunny, and how could it not be so, since the bunny in question is a stuffed animal? And not a Velveteen Rabbit-style stuffed animal that thinks and feels, but a just-ordinary stuffed animal (like my Barnesy the Noble Bear, for instance) that gets carted around from place to place.


The person doing the carting in Willems' funny little 'cautionary tale' is young Trixie, who takes her beloved Knuffle Bunny along when she accompanies her father to the laundromat. Trixie and her young parents live in New York City, and the lazy genius of Willems' story is to make the backgrounds of her pages actual photos, with the cartoon characters drawn onto them (this has also facilitated the Knuffle Bunny 'tours' that have sprung up in the city, since it's possible, 'Seinfeld'-style, to identify landmarks)(this is much the same reason why Japanese tourists who love Make Way for Ducklings always take pictures of real-life enormous Irish beat cops in Boston).

As Trixie and her dad are leaving the laundromat, Trixie has a horrifying realization: they've left her beloved Knuffle Bunny behind - in a washing machine. Hilarity ensues, and a heartwarming little happy ending is served up. The book is delightful and eminently re-readable, despite having only 30 words.

The third most popularly-suggested bunny-centric title will not, alas, be discussed here on Stevereads. It's something called Guess How Much I Love You, and it stars not only bunnies but jack-rabbits, and it's just too unbearably, mindlessly saccharine for inclusion here (ditto Pat the Bunny, for you handful of over-zealous advocates out there). No, these two late-breaking additions will have to do for now - but who knows what species we'll cover next, when we eventually return to the always-delightful world of kids books? Dogs would be too predictable coming from me, but there's always birds - and dinosaurs - and believe it or not, another round of BEARS wouldn't even come close to exhausting the treasures that are out there. We shall see!

Bunnies! Bunnies! Bunnies!

Our books today are three kids books starring bunnies, in response to the surprising number of you (almost all card-carrying members of the silent majority, alas - so many people reading and, presumably, enjoying Stevereads, so few people bothering to tell Steve that!) who reacted to my bear-themed kids books posting with what could only be called ursophobic levels of species-baiting. This was hardly a personal affront: I dislike bunnies every bit as much as I dislike bears. But it's true that bunny-themed kids books number among my favorites, so a sequel of sorts seemed called for.

Naturally, the place to start is the one that started it all: Beatrix Potter's 1902 story The Tale of Peter Rabbit. With their big eyes and preternatural air of innocence, bunnies are the kids storybook equivalent of Jesus (almost all of their stories are about redemption and reconfiguration)(whereas in the actual animal kingdom, almost all of their stories are about violent sex and eating their own poo), but Peter Rabbit is pure Old Testament. Peter is a nattily-dressed little rapscallion, not a picture-perfect child like his siblings Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail. The minute his long-suffering mother leaves for the bakery, Peter sneaks onto the property of Mr. McGregor, the gigantic, bearded figure who killed and ate Peter's father in a pie. Is it any wonder Peter turned out to be a trespasser, a thief, and quite probably gay?



Mr. McGregor chases Peter all over the property. Peter has several close calls, then manages to find his way back to the cozy den he shares with his mother and his sisters. He's exhausted from his raucous extracurricular activities, and as he lays there semi-conscious, his womenfolk brew him some tea. It's like something out of Trollope, only everybody has pug noses and buck teeth. Come to think of it, it's exactly like something out of Trollope.



Twenty years after The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Margery Williams wrote The Velveteen Rabbit, another genuine bunny-blockbuster. It's the story of a brand-new velveteen rabbit toy who's given to a young boy one Christmas (ding ding). The boy and the rabbit are inseparable, and the boy loves his rabbit dearly. The rabbit yearns to be Real, and an ancient toy from the house's collection, the Skin Horse, assures him it can happen:

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked. "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

(Needless to say, none of that is written for children ... Margery Williams was a wise woman)

As everyone knows, the Velveteen Rabbit goes through one horrible near-tribulation and is then reborn (ding ding) as a real rabbit, to live in Rabbitland forever and ever. This is sugary glop, it's true, but the final coda of The Velveteen Rabbit is worth swallowing a little glop.




Twenty years after The Velveteen Rabbit, another bunny blockbuster hip-hopped down the garden path: Margaret Wise Brown's The Runaway Bunny. The earlier theme of a rebellious rapscallion rabbit is resumed - the little bunny who wants to run away spins one scenario after another to his mother (again, the long-suffering kind ... a virtual maternal requirement, when you pop out sixty kids a year): he'll become a fish in a stream, he'll become a rock on a mountain, he'll become a crocus in the garden, he'll even become a boy and run inside, etc.

To each of these scenarios, the mother bunny has an unperturbed answer - she deftly inserts herself into her child's fantasies, always there to chase him, find him, catch him, love him.

"Shucks," said the bunny, "I might just as well stay where I am and be your little bunny."

And so he did.

"Have a carrot," said the mother bunny.

The book's Christian allegories have been noted before (most poignantly - and devastatingly - at the conclusion of Margaret Edson's brilliant play Wit)(watch the film version of that final scene, and see if you don't bawl your eyes out), but its real staying power lies in how effortlessly enjoyable it is to read slowly, out loud, page by page, to an audience of children. Because in this as in so much else, timing is everything. Jesus would have understood.

Bears! Bears! Bears!

Our books today are three children's books featuring bears - three of roughly three billion, bears-in-kids-books being wildly popular ever since the 'teddy bear' fad started in response to the publicized hunting stories of Theodore Roosevelt. Said fad swept the world like wildfire despite the fact that all of Roosevelt's own bear-stories involved him blasting them into eternity - and more importantly, them deserving it. Adult bears, you see, especially males, especially grizzly bears (far and away the most popular type of bear in kids books, even including pandas), are near-mindless, savagely vicious anger-junkies who tend to eviscerate first and ask questions later. There's nothing cute or cuddly about them; Baloo would've eaten Mowgli the first minute Bagheera wasn't looking.

But not in kids books! Not only are bears ubiquitous in kids books, but they're universally portrayed as extremely oversized labrador retrievers - slightly slow on the uptake but as good-hearted as could be. That might be true of bear cubs (I've only ever met one, and I can report he wasn't a homicidal maniac - yet), but it's the wildest flight of fancy when it comes to adult bears, who are like adult hippos (another kids favorite) in that they never met a temper tantrum they didn't like. In this case, as in so many cases, it's appearance that rules: kids love books with bears in them, because bears look like the bear toys they already have. It's a vicious circle, centering on a vicious animal.

And yet, I love several of those three billion bears-in-kids-books books, and these three are a good place to start, beginning with Brinton Turkle (before any of you ask, no, he's not me - yes, he's got the kind of name I fancy in my noms-de-plume, but he's got a lot more artistic ability than I do)'s 1976 book Deep in the Forest.


Deep in the Forest is a charming little inversion of the Goldilocks story - a bear cub wanders away from his mother and brothers and finds a log cabin in the woods (vaguely American Colonial, from the look of it). It's unlocked and empty, and the cub goes exploring. He finds a rocking chair and promptly destroys it; he finds bowls of food set out and hungrily empties them; he finds three beds and begins shredding them, before crawling under the covers of the smallest one, just as a happy family - father, mother, little girl - returns to their home.


They find the wreckage and puzzle over it, until the little girl finds the cub in her bed! The father chases the cub out of the house, and eventually the little guy returns to his family.




Turkle's book takes a big risk for a kids book: it has no words. Instead, the whole story relies on the evocative nature of his heavy pencil-and-wash artwork, which is very detailed and very accurate despite being slightly idealized. Unlike our other two books today, Deep in the Forest represents something that could actually happen and no doubt did in Colonial days.



Our second book is 1988's Can't You Sleep, Little Bear? by Martin Waddell, with wonderful illustrations by Barbara Firth. It tells the story of Big Bear and Little Bear, who play all day in the sunlight and at night return to the Bear Cave. Big Bear puts Little Bear to bed in the dark part of the cave and settles down with a good book by the fireside.

But Little Bear can't sleep - he's afraid of the dark. Big Bear puts a little lantern by Little Bear's bedside and returns to his book (in ten pages, Waddell more expertly captures the heartbreak of being interrupted while reading better than the overrated dolt Calvino could do in 200 pages of if on a winter's night a traveler). But Little Bear still can't sleep - the lantern casts some light, true, but not enough: there's still dark. So Big Bear goes through a couple more lanterns of increasing size, but Little Bear still can't sleep (and Big Bear only has two pages more to go!).



Eventually Big Bear decides to switch tactics: no, he doesn't kill and eat Little Bear, although an even slightly annoyed real bear wouldn't have hesitated - no, he takes Little Bear by the paw and leads him to the last place Little Bear expects: out into the dark!



Little Bear is afraid, but Big Bear points out the enormous, beautiful yellow moon shedding its gentle light over everything. "I've brought you the moon, Little Bear," said Big Bear. "The bright yellow moon and all the twinkly stars."



But Little Bear isn't listening, because he's sound asleep. Big Bear carries him back into the Bear Cave and cradles him in one arm while he returns to his book by the fireside. It's a sweet, wholly reaffirming little story that hints to kids that some of the things that frighten us aren't really all that frightening at all. And it's also a pretty accurate picture of how whimsically willful kids can be when they're supposed to be going to sleep. Barbara Firth's charming, perfectly detailed illustrations have a fine edge of humor about them.



Humor's done best, however, in our third book, Jez Alborough's great 1992 classic Where's My Teddy?

The story here involves Eddie, who's wandering in the woods looking for his teddy, whose name is Freddie. The woods frighten Eddie, but he's determined to find his teddy - but when he does find a teddy, it's enormous! "You're too big to huddle and cuddle," he said. "And I'll never fit both of us into my bed."



While Eddie's pondering this, he hears a loud rumbling coming closer through the woods, and eventually he makes out the words: "You're too small to huddle and cuddle," it said, "and you'll only get lost in my giant-sized bed!"

Suddenly a gigantic bear comes into view - holding an eensy-weensie teddy! The bear spots the oversized teddy at the same moment Freddie spots the bear:

"MY TED!" gasped the bear.
"A BEAR!" screamed Eddie.
"A BOY!" yelled the bear.
"MY TEDDY!" cried Eddie.

The two are so terrified that they grab their respective teddies


and race for safety the way they came.



The book ends with utterly charming pictures of the two of them, back in the safety of their beds, covers pulled up to their noses, teddies clutched tight. It follows the general pattern here, of bears as harmless doofuses who look a lot more frightening than they really are, and although a naturalist (or nature-lover with any hiking experience) might quibble over such a depiction, how can we complain about results this sweet?

Owl Moon!

Our book today is the 1987 children's classic Owl Moon by Jane Yolen, illustrated by John Schoenherr. It's the story - told in Schoenherr's gorgeous watercolors and Yolen's spare, beautiful prose-poetry - of a father and child who go out "owling" late, late one cold winter night. Once the lonely sound of a distant train whistle (and the dog-calls that respond to it) have stopped, everything is "quiet as a dream," and the two make their way to the forest, with the father stopping every so often to make owl-calls into the black.

Finally they come to a space:

Then we came to a clearing
in the dark woods.
The moon was high above us.
It seemed to fit
exactly
over the center of the clearing
and the snow below it
was whiter than the milk
in a cereal bowl.

Here the father calls again, and this time his call is answered from deep in the woods. A large shadow detaches itself from the forest and glides closer:

Pa turned on
his big flashlight
and caught the owl
just as it was landing
on a branch.

"For one minute," the child breathlessly recalls, "three minutes, maybe even a hundred minutes, we stared at one another."

Then the owl pumps its wings and flies silently away, and the father and child are left alone. They turn, hand-in-hand, and start to make their way back to the warmth of home with its one light on in the window. "When you go owling," we're told,

you don't need words
or warm
or anything but hope.
That's what Pa says.
The kind of hope
that flies
on silent wings
under a shining
Owl Moon.

Naturally, Owl Moon is highly recommended for owl-fans of any age.

Penny Press! The New Yorker!

The New Yorker, everybody's favorite maiden aunt despite the best efforts of Tina Brown and others to change that fact, has several points of interest this time out.

Oddly enough, considering that this is, after all, the New Yorker, one of the issue's interesting items is its short story. Ordinarily, the New Yorker's fiction is equal measures cautious and crappy - coming across something interesting (let alone good) is a fairly rare event.

We here at Stevereads aren't certain David Means' short story "A River in Egypt" is good, but it certainly rates as interesting.

It's premise - a father caring for his seriously ill little boy - is weighted in the author's favor from the start, but he takes narrative gambles nonetheless, and some of them pay off.

His choice of voice is very distinct - long, multi-jointed sentences, almost Jamesian in their florid superabundance. We here at Stevereads are no great fans of Henry James - we dislike almost all prose that's intentionally opaque. But more often than not, Means makes this trick work in his favor. Here's the end of the story, when the main character, Cavanaugh, is headed back into the city with his son, Gunner. See if you like what Means is trying to do:

"Cavanaugh imagined all of the above as he drove back over the Hudson while Gunner slept in the back seat with his head lolling to one side and his tiny mouth open around his own breath, and, down below, the river fretted with bits of white chop as the first hard wind of the fall drove down from the North and cut past Hook Mountain on its way to the city. As he drove, he began to cry, openly and with stifled guffaws, the way a man must cry when he is faced with the future, any future, a good one or a bad one, and after he has sat alone in a room with his child, waiting for sweat to collect so that he may know something about what is to come, some exactitude in the form of a diagnosis; he cried the way a man must cry when he's driving, keeping both hands on the wheel and his eyes wide open through the blur, and he cried the way a man must cry when he is exhausted from being up deep into the night while his boy coughs up almost unbelievable quantities of phlegm, clearly succumbing to a disease process - as his doctor called it - that at that point was indeterminate; he cried for himself as much as for his son, and for the world that was unfolding to his left, an open vista, the gaping mouth of the river, which at that moment was flowing down to the sea, hurrying itself into the heart of New York Harbor. He was crying like a man on a bridge - suspended between two sides of life, trapped in the blunt symbolism of the spans, and atop the floating pylons that sustained the decks of reinforced concrete - while his son slept soundly, unburdened now, it seemed, when Cavanaugh looked back at him in the mirror, and afloat on his own slumber. Not at all sick, or diseased, and free, from whatever torment the future might offer up. By the time (three minutes later) that Cavanaugh was exiting off the thruway and driving down Main Street (six minutes later), past the stately trees unfurling in their fall brilliance, he had collected himself and was clear-eyed and in a new state. He wasn't a man reborn at all. Not even close. That would come much later, after the second test, and when the results were in, conclusive and hard, no-nonsense in the statement they made. That would come (he imagined) when he gave himself over to the fact that salt moved chaotically in and out of certain cells, and that Gunner's body would forever confront certain facts: mucus blockages in his lungs and pancreas, and frequent infections. But for now, as he entered the town on a beautiful fall day, the diagnosis was somewhere off in the remote future, and he was alive and dealing with the moment at hand, which included his own actions in the sweat room, and the failure of his set design for the convention scene, and he felt himself growing calm before the sweet presence in the back seat, which came to him in the form of a soft snore, a little clicking sound that accomplished each exhalation, and then, finally, a small groan as the car settled over the curb of the driveway (eight minutes later) and came to a stop, and then another slight sniff as the boy awoke (one minute later), roused by the silence, the lack of road noise, and opened his eyes and blinked, and then said, 'Are we home? Are we home now, Dad?'"

That goes a long way toward some effect, and we tip our hat to the writer who at least tries it.

Elsewhere in the issue, there's a nauseating piece by Jeffrey Toobin about Senator Arlen Specter's support of the Bush administration's cancellation of habeas corpus for foreign detainees. Several of these 'detainees' have been locked up in American dungeons for years without any legal recourse at all other than the time-immemorial right of habeas corpus - that the imprisoning power is compelled to produce the person of the incarcerated in open court, and account to the keepers of that court why said person is being imprisoned.

My esteemed colleague the Reichmarshal would no doubt say foreign 'detainees' (the word just calls out for partial quotes, since the daily reality of these men argues against the misnomer - detainment is by definition temporary) have no rights and no expectation of rights from an already too-generous United States.

But the United States is not an island, and basic human rights don't stop at borders. Arlen Specter is and always has been a stupid tool of ambition. If every single other of his monstrous transgressions against the truth were thrown out, he'd still be damned for his particiation in the Warren Commission's purblind inquiry into the assassination of President Kennedy. His volte-face last minute reversal on the question of rights of foreign detainees (not just foreign, though: the actual wording of Military Commissions Act of 2006 is a lot more vague than the Reichmarshal would have you believe - there isn't anything in the actual wording of the text that protects natural-born innocent Americans) is just just more lickspittle complicity on his part.

But Arlen or no Arlen, there's only one right answer to this question. Either the United States is a nation that values human rights or it isn't. Not 'American rights.' Not 'human rights except in these trying times.' Listen carefully: either the United States is a nation that values human rights or it isn't.

If you say, 'OK, fine - if that's my choice, I say no: I'd rather the United States NOT be a nation that values human rights, if it means coddling foreigners and potential enemies,' if what you say some variation of that, well, that's your right.

But it does two things to you, when you start to cant stuff like that. First, it puts you outside of grace. You can 'detain' people indefinitely only if you're stronger than they are. You can deny them their basic legal rights if you control the courts. All well and good to say 'damn straight' in response to those points, but you have to understand something: if you say that, you're agreeing to live in a world where brute force determines EVERYTHING. Somebody bigger elbows past you at the gas pump? Too bad - they're bigger, so lump it. A hairier man takes a liking to your wife and moves in? Tough luck - he CAN, this hairier guy, so he will.

Second, it stops you from being American. This country was founded not only IN response to tyranny but AS a response to tyranny. In eloquent defiance of every single govermental schema yet then seen, the United States maintained something new: we here are founded not on a bloodline or a religious sect or a military junta ... we're founded on an IDEA.

That idea was freedom, as hokey and outdated as that term may sound today. When you become the tyrant, the jailor, the torturer, when you endorse torture and eviscerate habeas corpus, you become all the things this country was founded against.

Luckily, we don't have to end our New Yorker round-up on such a depressing note! Not when we can turn from a tool to a full-blown nutjob!

The article in question is called, rather ominously, "Goodnight Mush." It's by Eizabeth Kolbert, and it's a screed against ... well, against children's literature. Kids picture books.

Turns out they've been an evil racket all along, Kolbert sternly warns. They're all a plot on the part of their authors (who meet on every other Tuesday, I think), with one over-arching purpose in mind: to brainwash young children into going to bed without making a fuss. Here is her grim summary:

"... why do we tell stories to our children? In my experience, mostly it is to get them to shut up. A book read to a toddler who, after running around the house all day, has had to be stuffed, quite literally, into his pajamas, may traffic in imaginative freedom and wonder, but it is still an instrument of control. I will read this to you, and then you will go to sleep. End of story."

And on it goes:

"The tension, or, if you prefer, bad faith implicit in this arrangement is itself one of the great themes of bedtime literature, and many of the tales now regarded as classics celebrate children as artists (and artists as children), only, in the end, to sell them both out."

Yeesh. Where were the rest of us all this time, while such iron bargains were being imposed on our ruthless children?

Like a reformed alcoholic, Kolbert sees her pet vice everywhere. It'd be funny, if it weren't so creepy. Even the gentle "Bedtime for Frances" fails to escape condemnation:

"'Bedtime for Frances' was published in 1960. As a child born the following year, I identified with its heroine, both because of her insomnia and because of her domestic situation (Waking my father in the middle of the night was not considered a bright idea.)"

OKaaaaaay. By this point it's pretty clear that Kolbert needs not a reviewer but an entomologist - somebody better qualified to analyze the great big BUG UP HER ASS.

Frances has insomnia? For that matter, Frances has a 'domestic situation'?

Kolbert's stalking progress through the highs and lows of famous childrens books goes on for a conscientious span of pages, the whole while apparently unaware of the possibility that FUN might be an element in books written for kids. She ends on a typically cheery note:

"A parent is bigger than a child, but still a person. He or she can be appealed to, as in 'Bedtime for Frances,' or even tricked, as in 'Good Night, Gorilla.' The arrangements in 'Goodnight Moon' is completely uneven. Time moves forward, and the little bunny doesn't stand a chance. Parent and child are, in this way, brought together, on tragic terms. You don't want to go to sleep. I don't want to die. But we both have to."

Now that's some pretty funny stuff.