Book Review: Good Housekeeping's Best Book of Nature Stories

Title: Good Housekeeping’s Best Book of Nature Stories

Author (editor): Pauline Rush Evans

Date: 1957

Publisher: Prentice-Hall

ISBN: none

Length: 383 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Mel Hunter

Quote: “I have long held a private theory...that as long as you let other creatures alone, they will let you alone.”

Explaining how she was able to enjoy both gardens and groundhogs, Margery Bianco (of “Velveteen Rabbit” fame) may be said to have provided the theme for these twenty-six animal stories. Only the last story mentions that some animals are enemies to humans. Even there, when the cattlemen  “have to” kill the wolves, they remember the wolves—who have earned names, Lobo and Bianca—with a sort of romantic admiration.

The other twenty-five stories are a delight. They feature big animals (a lion, an elephant, cobras) and small ones (water striders, and a European burrowing wasp small enough that all her offspring can live on the carcass of one large grasshopper). Each is narrated as a story. Not all are told the way scientists tell children about animals today, but each seems to have been drawn from life. Most of the stories were either previews or abridgments of full-length books by authors who were considered good in their day (Cherry Keaton, W.H. Hudson, Raymond L. Ditmars)or are still admired today (Ernest Thompson Seton, Jean George, Edwin Way Teale, Rachel Carson).

Animal protagonists include the groundhogs, a dolphin,ants, songbirds, coyotes, lions, stick insects, a cardinal (in its fruit-eating South American phase, otters, a tadpole, sharks, foxes, jerboas, aye-aye (lemurs), echidnas, cobras, skunks, penguins, a red squirrel, bats, water-striders, a beaver, bees, an eel, the burrowing wasp, and the wolves.

Reading levels vary. Most children like animal stories; most children are likely to enjoy this collection. If one or two stories (notably the one about the tadpole) seem to talk down to elementary school audiences, others were written  for teenagers and adults. Since each individual story is short, I’d offer this book for supplementary reading for primary school children, but expect their levels of interest and enjoyment to change from year to year. The Sea Around Us is a reasonably challenging read for adults; an excerpt from it might have been included as a hint to teenagers not to dismiss Good Housekeeping’s Best Book of Nature Stories as “babyish.”

To buy it here, send $5 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment to the appropriate address at the very bottom of the screen. Four books of this size will fit into a package.