Cat Up a Tree

We found Cat Up a Tree at the library this week, and I like it so much I might buy a copy. Charlie and I have both enjoyed it very much.

At the beginning of the book, an old woman notices a cat stuck in the tree outside her window. Naturally, she calls the fire department to help. But they won't help. "Sorry, we do not catch cats up a tree anymore. Call back if that cat starts playing with matches."

By this time, there are five cats stuck in the tree, so the old woman tries calling the police station. They won't help either. More cats show up. She calls the zoo. They don't catch cats. And so on, and so on, and so on.

This is a fantastic book for a number of reasons. It teaches about different institutions and what services they provide. The old woman calls the fire department, the police, the pet store, the zoo, the post office, the library, and city hall. Each of them says they don't rescue cats up a tree, but mentions something about the job they actually do. Notably, most (but not all!) of these institutions are governmental. If it weren't for the inclusion of the pet store, one could make a nice little lesson about government services versus the free market here. Still, it does provide an opportunity to talk about all of these institutions that are set up for specific helpful purposes, but not for anything you might want them to do for you. And it's quite funny, too, particularly when city hall offers to put up a sign that says "Danger! Look up for Falling Cats."

The book also provides some fun counting practice, and in particular, counting by fives. It starts with one cat, then five, and then adds five more on each page, up to forty. This is quite a lot, compared to most counting books that only go up to ten or twelve. And since they're scattered all over the page, it's a challenge to keep track of which cats you've counted already.

So, what happens in the end? Are the poor cats stuck up the tree forever? Fortunately, no. The old woman gets so frustrated that she throws her phone out the window. But she doesn't unplug it from the wall first! The cats walk across the phone cord into her apartment, safe and sound. Good thing it wasn't a cell phone!

There's a nice little coda at the end, too. The old woman gets a call from city hall (presumably after reeling her phone back in to the house). There are mice everywhere, all over town! Can she help? "Sorry," she tells them. "The cats do not catch mice anymore. Call back if you wish to hear cats purr." I was so pleased that she didn't get altruistic in the end, but refused to help the people who had refused to help her. You might look at this as a sort of modern re-telling of The Little Red Hen, the classic fable in which nobody helps the hen with her planting and harvesting of wheat or baking of bread, so she refuses to share the bread with them in the end. This is a little different, because the old woman didn't actually do any work to rescue the cats herself, but just happened to rescue them by chance. Still, the principle is pretty similar.

We've had tons of fun with this book. It was a great find.

The Midnight Farm

The Midnight Farm is a nearly perfect bedtime story. Once again, I've chosen a book that is out of print, but plenty of used copies are available on Amazon. I've written before about books that create a mood, and this one is an excellent example of the genre. Charlie is usually wide awake when we finish reading his bedtime stories, but this one makes even him a little bit sleepy.

The story is simple and intuitive. A mother gets her son ready for bed by walking around the farm with him, looking at all the animals ready for the night. Some of the animals are settling in to sleep, while others are nocturnal and engaged in their activities.

The book is written in very nice poetry, which contributes to the mood. I'm sure there's a name for this form, but I don't know it -- the first line of each verse is the same as the last line of that verse, with a different beginning. Each verse begins, "Here is the dark of [place]" and it ends, "In the dark of the [place]." Here's one verse to give you a sample:

Here is the dark of the maple tree
Where a raccoon family, one, two, three,
Is making a home in a place that was free
In the dark of the maple tree.

I didn't notice until I was on page five or six of my first reading, but this is also a counting book. After the introductory verse, each page counts up one more animal, to ten. We start with one dog, then two cats, three raccoons, four geese, five horses, etc. This is very subtle, without calling attention to it and without the numbers printed on the pages.

My only complaint about this book is that two of the verses don't rhyme properly. It's very disappointing, since the rest of the book (and the poetry!) is so fantastic, and I wish the author could have fixed this. One verse rhymes stove/glove/love, and another rhymes pond/around/sound. It's annoying, but I'm willing to overlook it because the book is so wonderful in other ways.

The illustrations are also amazing. They are extremely realistic paintings. The people and animals look almost like you could reach out and touch them. The colors are varied, yet muted for evening and bedtime. Just looking at the pictures here is a real treat.

This is a wonderful book for a quiet and peaceful bedtime or naptime story. Charlie sometimes asks for it during the day, too, and then he likes to count the animals and point out the ones that aren't mentioned in the text ("One, two, three raccoons, and an owl!"). I really can't believe this one went out of print.

If You Made a Million

Charlie is way too young for this book. But I'm blogging about it now anyway, even though I haven't shown it to him, because it is such a great find. I am guessing that If You Made a Million is best for the 6-8 age range, but I don't have all that much experience with kids that age, so read the rest of this review and make your own judgment. (NOTE: At the time of this writing, there is something wrong with Amazon's "look inside" feature for this book, such that most of the illustrations are missing.)

This book explains money and various financial transactions in ways that are clear, straightforward, and highly accessible to kids. We work up to the title concept of a million dollars, but we start all the way at the beginning, with a penny.

"CONGRATULATIONS!" the first page announces. "YOU'VE EARNED A PENNY." A little girl is shown feeding a goldfish under a sign that says "Feed the Fish - Earn 1 cent." There's a photograph of a single penny, and the text explains, "It will buy anything that costs one cent." As an example, a boy has set up a stand where he's selling pebbles for one cent each.

When you turn the page, you've earned a nickel. (How, you ask? By dusting a duck, of course.) The book shows a photograph of a nickel and five pennies. It explains "ONE NICKEL is worth the same as FIVE PENNIES." We continue down the page and earn a dime, which we are clearly shown, in the same way, is the same as two nickels or ten pennies. Obvious. Straightforward. Clear. Countable. I particularly like that they mix up the fronts and backs of the coins.

Once we get to a dollar, the book starts to mix things up a bit. After explaining the various low-cost items we could buy with that dollar, the book makes a very different suggestion.

Or perhaps you'd like to save your dollar. You could put it in the bank, and a year from now it will be worth $1.05. The bank wants to use your money and it will pay you five cents to leave your dollar there for a year. The extra five cents is called interest. If you waited ten years, your dollar would earn sixty-four cents in interest just from sitting in the bank. Are you interested in earning lots of interest? Wait twenty years, and one dollar will grow to $2.70.

Dude.

Then we're back to explaining how much $5 is, and $10, and we do another interest calculation with putting $10 in the bank, and on up to $100, and then at long last we earn $1000. We'd like to buy a pet hippo with our $1000, but that's a huge wad of cash.

If you don't like the idea of carrying a thousand dollars around with you, you can put it in the bank and pay for the hippo with a check. The check tells your bank to give $1,000 to the person who sold you the hippo.

To illustrate how this works, the book presents a picture of a check written out for a thousand dollars.

Okay, that's a pretty good explanation. But wait, we're not done! There's a whole two-page explanation of how the process works in detail. You write the check and give it to the person who sold you the hippo, who gives it to his bank, who sends it to a clearinghouse, which tells your bank to take the money out of your account and the other person's bank to put the money into his account. Why did nobody give me this book when I was a kid?

All right. Now we've managed to earn $50,000 and we've decided to use it to buy a castle that's on sale for $100,000. But wait a minute. We don't have $100,000. We only have $50,000. What should we do? Get a mortgage, of course! Fully explained in clear detail.

Finally we earn a million dollars, and we have tons of saving and spending choices. What should we do? Well, the book tells us, it's really all about you and your personal values. What would you like to do? What would you like to have? Where would you like to go?

If you keep your million, you can probably live on the interest without doing any more work for the rest of your life. You might like that, or you could find it rather dull.

Making money means making choices.

So what would you do if you made a million?

Fantastic.

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.

Green Eggs and Ham

Dr. Seuss books are most commonly marketed to beginning readers in kindergarten and first grade. But some of them are excellent for barely-verbal young toddlers as well. Charlie fell in love with Green Eggs and Ham when he was about 15 months old, and it was a constant favorite in our house until he turned two.

Most people know this story already, but here's a brief recap for anyone who, like me, did not actually read this book as a child (I think my mother disliked it because ham is unkosher). Sam asks his nameless Friend if he'd like some green eggs and ham. Friend says that he does not like green eggs and ham. Sam then asks Friend if he would eat green eggs and ham in various exciting situations (in a house? with a mouse? in the rain? on a train?), but Friend repeatedly insists that he will not eat them anywhere. Finally, after much harassment, Friend agrees to take a bite if Sam will finally leave him alone. Lo and behold, Friend turns out to really like green eggs and ham.

The story is written as a cumulative poem, introducing concepts of repetition and rhyme. The incidental words change (for example, "I do not like them in a box" changes a few pages later to "I would not, could not in a box") but the major subjects appear every time in the same order as new situations are added. The easy rhymes allow a child to think of the correct word to fill in the blank at a very young age.

The simple story is also easy to follow from a very young age. This was the first book that Charlie ever tried to read to me. He must have been about 18 months old, and his rendition went something like this: "Green eggs and ham? No! In car? No! In boat? No! On train? No! All gone!" It was completely adorable.

A friend reminded me yesterday that many Dr. Seuss books have made-up nonsense words throughout. This can be problematic for babies and toddlers who are still trying to acquire a basic vocabulary. Montessori advocates talking to even very young children in ordinary English, without baby talk or nonsense words. Fortunately, Green Eggs and Ham doesn't have any nonsense words. It's composed entirely of short, simple, real words.

This is a classic that served us well for many months. It's back on the storage shelf now, but I plan to bring it out again during the early reading stage if not sooner.

For a hilarious coda, here is Jesse Jackson performing a dramatic reading of this book on Saturday Night Live.

It Takes a Village

This review is a "don't judge a book by its cover" tale. Sometime last summer, Charlie and I stumbled across a garage sale held by a recently retired elementary school teacher who was selling off enormous quantities of kids' books for twenty-five cents each. I bought about forty books there, I am not kidding. Some of them were fantastic. Others just okay. It's hard to go through hundreds of books while a squirmy toddler sits in his stroller, and at twenty-five cents a pop, I erred on the side of purchase more often than I otherwise would. When I saw It Takes a Village, judging by the title alone, I assumed it would be terrible. I bought it so that I could have a good laugh and then chuck it in the trash.

It actually turned out to be a rather good book.

Who would have thought?

The only thing I actually dislike about this book is the title and its repetition on the last page of the book. The rest of the story is great, and the pictures are quite nice also.

The story takes place in an African village. (If you look closely at the signs in the background images, you'll notice a French influence. The author's notes on the last page of the book say that it's Benin.) A mother and her daughter and son take their mangos to the market to sell them. The girl, Yemi, around 7 or 8 years old, is given the task of looking after her younger brother, Kokou, who is probably 2 or 3. They set off to look around the market together, but Kokou soon wanders off and Yemi spends the rest of the book looking for him.

Yemi is worried, but Kokou is having a grand time walking around the market and meeting all the friendly people who are selling their wares. Different people give him food, water, entertainment, and a place to nap. Yemi finally finds Kokou and walks back through the market with him, thanking all of the people who helped him throughout the day. Finally they return to their mother, who is not surprised or worried at all. She knows that "it takes a village to raise a child" -- by which she means that the community members are friendly and benevolent and can be trusted.

I really like this moral, just not the words that it is phrased in. In the first place, the children are very free-range. Their mother lets them wander around the market without supervision even though they are quite young, and then the pre-schooler manages to set off on his own and is perfectly fine. This wandering is not shown as subversive or dangerous, but actually quite natural and expected by the mother and all the other adults in the story. And the reason that it's so safe for the kids to wander around freely is that the adults in the community are trusted, even if they are strangers, and they are all relaxed and friendly. This is exactly the kind of community that everyone wants to be a part of. The phrasing is not perfect. It doesn't take a village to "raise" a child. It takes a benevolent community to create a society in which children can exercise full age-appropriate independence. But that's not such a catchy title, I guess.

The illustrations in this book are realistic and use vibrant colors. Charlie loves to point out all the different items for sale in the market and all the activities that Kokou does with the grownups he meets. He is particularly intrigued by the fact that Kokou doesn't wear a shirt or shoes. ("Mommy, why him go outside with no shoes?") My only minor complaint about the illustrations is that on a couple of pages, there are multiple "time-lapse" pictures of the same characters on the same page. This can be confusing to kids who don't understand why there are four Yemis on this page. But it's a small point compared to the valuable things in the book.

So. You can't judge a book by its title.

No, David!

I first heard about No, David! from Charlie's day care teacher, who recommended it as a perennial favorite in her class. Then, when he switched schools a few months later, I heard about it from his new day care teacher. Within a couple more months, I was hearing about it from Charlie himself. Really, it's completely understandable. What could toddlers possibly like more than watching a kid do all the things they're not allowed to do, and getting to tell him "No, David!" on each page?

David writes on walls. He balances precariously on top of a chair to reach the cookie jar on a high shelf. He tracks mud through the house and splashes water out of the bath. He runs outside without any clothes on!!! He bangs pots and pans together, plays with his food, shoves everything into his mouth at once, and chews with his mouth open. He jumps on his bed, picks his nose, and breaks a vase by playing baseball inside the house. David is in sooooooooooo much trouble. But his mother still loves him, and gives him a big hug on the last page.

The story is told with an absolute minimum of words. Each two-page spread is an illustration of a single bad thing David does. The only words are variations on "No, David!" The illustrations are not really to my liking. They're done in a style I refer to as "dumb cartoon," so I was surprised to see that this is a Caldecott Honor Book. Still, they do provide a fair amount of detail to discover, and they manage to tell the story entirely on their own.

Charlie loves to tell me rambling and semi-coherent vignettes from this book. "Mommy say 'No, David!' Maybe he fall and bump his head because he trying to reach the cookie jar waaaaaay up high and it on the shelf and he maybe fall and bump his head so she say 'No, David! That is not ok!' Ask for a cookie maybe?"

This is on my kid's all-time most-loved toddler books list. Highly recommended.