The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z

I desperately wanted to like The Alphabet from A to Y With Bonus Letter Z!. Partially because it's co-written by Steve Martin (yes! the actor!), partially because the title is so fun and hilarious, and partly because the inside cover has a series of great cartoons in which non-English letters like ash, thorn, and a-circumflex complain about not being included in the book. Tragically, however, the book is terrible as an alphabet book.

Legible Capital and Lowercase: F.  Each page features a very large capital letter. There is no lowercase version featured. This would be fine, except that they use a highly embellished font for the large letters, so some of them are completely unrecognizable to a child just learning the alphabet. You can see what I mean by going to Amazon's look-inside feature and scrolling down to the A page. The A has a long flag flying off to the left from the top, and the left leg of it curls into a spiral. I pointed to it and asked Charlie what letter it was, and he said, "I don't know that one." FAIL. A few of the letters are normal-looking, but with this font, Charlie had trouble identifying A, E, F, G (honestly, I had a little trouble with this one!), M, N, Q, U, and W (this one, too! it looks like an X with wings!).

Filler Words: D. There are a lot of them, and the authors seem to be intentionally putting confusing sounds together. More on this under the Cheat Words section, because in this case, they kind of go together.

Cheat Words: D. This book goes out of its way to play with unusual starting sounds. That can be fun for grown-ups, but it's just plain confusing for children. The N page, for example, is an extended play on words that start with "kn." It reads, "Needle-nosed Nigel won nine kinds of knockwurst / By winning a contest to see who could knock worst." The W page uses "weally" instead of "really" to be cute, but try reading that to a child who has trouble saying the difference. The X page not only puts X's in the middle of words, but also intersperses them with ct and ck making the same sound: "Ambidextrous Alex was actually axed / For waxing, then faxing, his boss's new slacks." They also sometimes, randomly, use foreign words.

Understandable Words: C. This book is probably written for an older audience. It has a lot of gross-out jokes going on, and the vocabulary can be pretty abstract and/or obscure at times. Words include clingy, clueless, dapper, derby, frijoles, gravlax, heaven, and hunchbacks.

Sounding Out: B. The sentences have a mix of long and short words, some phonetic and some not. If you're intent on sounding something out, you'll find opportunities for it here.

Hidden Pictures: A. This is one area where the book shines. Each letter has a full-page illustration filled with things that start with the letter. The A page, for example, shows a scene of three women eating sandwiches in a living room. Checking out all the details in the picture, you can find aces (from a deck of cards), aardvark, angel, acorn, a tube of "Acne Away," alligator, abacus, apple, axe, and books labeled "Art of Antarctica," "All About Algebra," "Asparagus Acres," "Aaron's Appendicitis Almanac," and more.

Illustrations: B+. The pictures are cartoon style and kind of ugly, but full of the rich detail described above. They also show the characters and activities listed in the sentence for each letter.

Theme: (none).

Wow. Overall, this is one of the worst reviews I've ever written. The book does have a couple of redeeming features, mostly the illustrations. Some of its humor is good, but other jokes are very potty-oriented and gross-out, so I wouldn't recommend reading it just for the adult humor value. But the main problem here is that this is not a book designed to teach the alphabet to kids. It certainly does not accomplish that very well at all.

An Island Called Liberty

When an acquaintance pointed out a book that was described as "a cross between Dr. Seuss and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged," I knew I had to have a copy. Unfortunately, An Island Called Liberty is sorely disappointing.

The story is about an Island called (you guessed it) Liberty, which begins as a libertarian paradise. Then, one by one, the people think up great new ideas that can be implemented with government regulation. As the taxes and government workers add up, the economy tanks. It's very Road to Serfdom.

There are a lot of problems with this book, which I will go into in detail, but I think the fundamental problem underlying all the others is that it was not actually written for kids. I have no proof of this, but it strikes me as very likely. The text is a Dr. Seuss style poem about the economy-killing results of government regulation, but it doesn't explain anything on a level that children can understand. It reads much more like a poem that was written as a joke for grown-ups, as many Dr. Seuss parodies are. Add some illustrations, and bingo, instant kids' book! Or not.

At the most basic level, the poetry is awful. There are rhythm problems throughout, and some of the rhymes are pretty awful, too (e.g. "agency" in no way rhymes with "urgency"). The rhythm problems begin on page one, which begins:

There once was an island called Liberty,
Where people lived happy and free.
Life was not perfect, as any could see,
But the Islanders made it the best it could be.

As anyone should be able to recognize, the second line is two syllables short, with no obvious place to put pauses to make up the difference. The word "Liberty" in the first line also makes the rhythm awkward. The author didn't even have the sense to fix it up with easy filler words which, while still cheating, would have made it flow better. My own edit:

There once was an island they called Liberty,
Where all of the people lived happy and free.
Life was not perfect, as any could see,
But the Islanders made it the best it could be.

Simple, simple, simple. And so disappointing that the author didn't bother to fix these things. Such errors appear at least once on every page.

The illustrations are also amateurish. They're cute enough, but not really evocative or interesting. They don't add anything to the text. Reading the book, I felt that the illustrations were there mainly because children's picture books have to have illustrations, and for no other reason. Still, I have no particular fault with them.

If you manage to get through the clunky text, you'll find that the story does not do a very good job at explaining why all of the newly-enacted government regulations are bad. Near the end, we get a close look at the effect of taxes on one company, Bridget's Widgets & Wodgets, but this illustrates only the problems with the tax burden, not the problems of regulation in and of itself. (Additionally, I wish the character of Bridget had been introduced earlier in the story so the reader would identify more with her.) The regulations and government programs all sound like great ideas -- that's why the citizens of Liberty vote to adopt them -- but unless the reader is already in on why these sorts of things (welfare, medicare, standardized education, interstate highways, an "unsafe baby-toy ban") are inherently bad ideas, the reader is left with the impression that these things would be great if only they didn't cost so much money. That is (1) not true, and (2) nearly impossible for a child with a limited grasp of economics to understand. Concepts like personal responsibility, freedom of choice, and the importance of variety rather than standardization are almost completely absent in this book.

The publisher's comparison of this book to Ayn Rand is also off the mark. Certainly, the message of economic freedom is consistent with Rand's views on government. But that's where the similarity ends. There is no sense in the book of the moral values underlying capitalism and freedom that Rand stressed so strongly. While the text expresses disgust at rules limiting personal freedoms like smoking, flag-burning, and eating fattening foods, it does not talk about the importance of hard work and personal responsibility. It doesn't treat tax as an immoral theft, as Rand did, but instead as a purely economic burden that is fine when small but overwhelming when it gets too large. And though the text stresses the well-functioning private welfare system that operated before the government took it over, it doesn't explain the motivation for helping others in need. It just blithely recites that "caring for others fits our Islander goals," leading readers to think that the commonly-accepted virtues of altruism and charity are the primary motivation, rather than the enlightened self-interest that Rand would have identified.

The lack of philosophical underpinnings for the economic system create a depressing ending for the book as well. After the economic collapse caused by high taxes, the citizens have an epiphany. They thought the government regulation was helping, but it was actually hurting! They need to dismantle that structure and go back to a liberty-based society! Hooray! Except, then you turn to the last page and discover that after a while they forgot all this again and went back to massive regulation in an unending cycle. And they all lived unhappily ever after. The end.

Okay then. I guess there's still a market opportunity available for someone to write a good children's book about government regulation.