NYRB Children's Collection

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NYRB Children's Collection

The Backward Day sounds adorable:

For some reason, young children get an absurd kick out of doing things backward, or spelling words backward, or otherwise behaving contrariwise for comic effect. This can be charming, but it can pretty quickly get tedious, too, as any parent will attest who has ever tried to get a straight answer out of a bunch of gleeful children chanting, "It's opposite day! It's opposite day!' " Ruth Krauss's 1950 picture book, "The Backward Day" -- just revived in elegant hardback as part of the New York Review's Children's Collection -- speaks directly to this anarchic impulse. In the brief tale, a little boy wakes one morning and decides that it is "backward day." So he gets up and puts on his coat, then his clothes -- with his underwear on the outside. He puts on his shoes, and over them his socks. "Then he turned his head backward as far as he could, to see over his shoulder, and he walked backward out of the room and backward down the stairs."

Come to think of it ... this description, of children's affection for doing things backwards, fits perfectly with what Temple and I are saying about the nature of play in our book about animal welfare ....

So I guess that means I have to buy this book.


I have to buy this book because it's a business expense!

I've just ordered The Bear and the People from Amazon Marketplace. I have no idea whether C. will like it, but how many children's books about God come across my path? None.

"Well, there was a man once, and he had a bear . . ." begins this story about a life long friendship between man and beast. The Bearman and the bear understand each other. Together they travel all over the country, "a part of the highway like the knotty old apple trees and whitehorn bushes," as they go from village to village, where they play music and juggle and dance and the children are always happy to see them. At night they sleep in the open, and before they do the Bearman tells a story and plays a beautiful melody on his horn for the bear and for God, a melody so beautiful that all the animals in the forest raise their heads and the leaves themselves stop rustling and listen.

And yet the Bearman and the bear have enemies: the jealous members of the Duda family, who are thieves and tricksters; and even more than that, the dogs. And when the Bearman dies, the bear must retreat into the wilderness for safety—until, after many adventures, he meets a new friend: a boy.

The Bear and the People is a lovely parable of friendship and courage and reverence for the natural world. It is a tale that is as exciting as it is touching and profound, and it will delight children and parents alike.

And I'm seriously contemplating hitting the Two-Day 1-Click -- Free button for The Lost Island, The Little Bookroom, and The Island of the Horses. Here's NYRB's description of the author, Ellis Dillon:

Eilís Dillon (1920-1994) wrote more than thirty books for young people, as well as fiction for adults, including the best-selling historical novel Across the Bitter Sea, about the struggle for Irish independence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With few exceptions, her young people's books are set in the west of Ireland, in small communities struggling to make a living on the islands and along the Atlantic coast. As the critic Declan Kiberd wrote in Dillon's obituary: “What Laura Ingalls Wilder did for children's literature in the US, she achieved in Ireland, imparting a sure historical sense in books such as The Singing Cave. That interest in history was a natural expression of her curiosity of mind, and of her family inheritance.

I better knock off here and go do some math.

Which reminds me.

The book all of us parents of middle schoolers really need is How to Think Like a Behavior Analyst, by Jon Bailey. What an enormous help. Somehow I had managed to forget the most basic principles of behavior analysis, up to and including "Grandma's Rule," aka the Premack Principle.

I've put Christopher & me both on the Premack Principle and it is working.

Of course, keeping myself (and everyone else) on a Premack Principle regimen is the question.