Book Review: Country Friends Good Times

Title: Country Friends (TM) Good Times

Author: Gooseberry Patch Co.

Date: 1998

Publisher: Gooseberry Patch Co. 

ISBN: 1-888052-27-9

Length: 216 pages

Quote: "Treat yourself to a good friend."

In Ohio there is a town called Delaware. In that town two women, "Jo Ann" and "Vickie," and a few more of their friends off and on, set up a mail-order business called the Gooseberry Patch Company. They sold cute, whimsical, handwritten-looking books like this one, which is primarily a book of suggestions about cheap ways to have fun. Not necessarily the healthiest ways--they trust the reader's judgment about how many sugary or cheesy food treats will really be fun--but generally cheap ways. 

"Gooseberry Patch Co." sold out to a larger publisher but still exists as an imprint; they still have a few hundred cute little cookbooks in print. Well, if you count books like this as a cookbook. The majority of instructions and suggestions in these 216 pages are not for cooking but a recipe index does count 49 recipes for things some people will eat.

Maybe the best way to describe this book is to flip through the pages and give the suggestion at the top of five or six pages:

* Decorate a plain flowerpot with a cute little gift label (you could photocopy theirs from the book), put in some potting soil and a flower bud or seedling, and give it to a friend.

* Darn a sock by saying "Oh, darn!" and throwing it away. (Well, that's a joke. This web site knows several things to do with a worn-out sock that are more fun.)

* Start a good friends' gathering club. 

* Host an "ice cream social" party. For invitations, stick a little card giving the time and place information in green paper or plastic "glass" in an actual ice cream cone and hand one to each person invited.

* Exercise like a kid...jump rope!

* Make a gift basket for a tea loving friend: paper doilies, a tin of very special tea, a loaf of homemade bread, a jar of preserves, a lacy napkin, a beautiful antique china teacup, and a pretty jar of lemon sugar. 

Feel-good reading, for sure. The emphasis on friends, kids, and going out means that these suggestions can help cure "depression." One of the leading causes of "depression" is lack of physical activity, and these antidepressant activities will inspire almost anybody to turn off the TV, get off the couch, and do something that is fun that involves a nice low-stress level of physical activity. If these things don't help, there may be an underlying physical cause. At least it helps to rule out lack of exercise before testing for more complicated conditions.

Book Review: El Principio de Dilbert

Book Title: El Principio de Dilbert

Original Title: The Dilbert Principle

Author: Scott Adams

Translator: J.M. Pomares

Publisher: Granica

Date: 1997 (Spanish), 1996 (English)

Length: 338 pages

Illustrations: cartoons by the author

ISBN: 8475777821

Quote: "Los trabajadores mas ineficientes son trasladados sistematicamente alli donde pueden causar menos dano: la direccion de la empresa."

In theory the Spanish edition ought to be reviewed in Spanish, as on Amazon it is, but out of respect to the Spanish language, as well as the English-speaking readers, I'm writing this blog in English. Readers whose first language is Spanish are, however, invited to advertise their translation skills by translating any blog posts they consider worth the trouble.

The Peter Principle stated that workers are promoted to their level of incompetence. The Dilbert Principle (in English) stated that incompetent workers are promoted to the place where they can do most harm: management.

The statement was made, of course, by what a Granica employee describes on Amazon as "the classic American story of an introvert engineer and his megalomaniac dog." (Actually, in the bizarre reality of the cartoon series, Dogbert does own the company; that's why the pointy-haired jerk can't fire Wally, Alice, and Dilbert.)

Beyond the middle-aged-boy-and-his-dog motif, the popularity of the Dilbert series comes from its interactive element: the cartoons illustrate complaints real office workers e-mailed to Scott Adams about real office policies and politics. The book isn't just a collection of cartoons, although most pages include one or more cartoons. The book also includes lots of e-mails, edited for brevity and privacy, but more or less in the correspondents' own words.

Drawings and e-mails are connected by Adams' philosophical reflections, which are as snarky and funny in Spanish as they were in English. All people are stupid--some times, about some things. This stupidity is a source of wealth for satirists. At the end of the book Adams does, however, offer the "F5 conceptual model" for businesses that want to minimize corporate stupidity; F5 stands for "fuera a las 5" (out of the office by 5 p.m.). Toward this goal, the first heading is "APARTARSE DEL CAMINO" (get out of the way--don't bother with policies that dictate conformity, and don't try to organize creativity). So what can the manager do? Fire jerks, teach efficiency by example, and try to ensure that everybody learns something every day.

Introverts have to love the Dilbert series...it shows how annoying the "people persons" (extroverts) some companies have tried to promote really are, to the people who are worth their salaries. For this reason alone, El Principio de Dilbert would be warmly recommended even if it weren't also (a) instructive and (b) hilarious.

Whether your first language is English or Spanish, this book is easy to read without continual reference to the other copy or to the dictionary. Business vocabulary words in both languages are almost identical...and reading this book bilingually is a painless way to learn them. Try to find a place where chortling won't distract others. This book might not be considered ideal for reading in an actual cubicle.

Book Review: The Simpsons Xmas Book

Book Review: The Simpsons Xmas Book

Author: Matt Groening and Mimi Pond

Date: 1990, 1992

Publisher: Harper Collins

ISBN: 0-06-096960-1

Length: pages not numbered

Illustrations: cartoons in color

Quote: “Maggie’s walking by herself. Lisa got straight A’s. And Bart, well, we love Bart.”

What Bart Simpson wants for Christmas is a tattoo that says “Mother.” The drug-damaged tattoo artist who accepts Bart’s claim that Bart is twenty-one gives him a tattoo that says “moth.” Marge spends all the money she’s been saving for the holidays to have this tattoo removed.

Homer’s boss decides at the last minute not to give out any Christmas bonuses. Rather than share this news with his family, Homer retreats into anger, throws a tantrum, screams that “Christmas is cancelled,” and sneaks out to buy really cheap presents. “And for me, some breath mints...which the family will appreciate too.”

Can Christmas be more than a shopping spree for the Simpsons...or for real, three-dimensional people who have no religion? If you’ve not already learned the answer on TV, you need the book. If you enjoyed the TV special, you might want the book as a souvenir. Every Simpsons collection needs the Xmas Book. 

Book Review: El Nino Que Era Muy Hombre

Book Review: El Niño que Era Muy Hombre

Author: Andreu Martin

Date: 1991

Publisher: Anaya

ISBN: 84-207-4495-6

Length: 78 pages

Illustrations: colorful cartoons by Francesc Rovira

Quote: “Había una vez un niño que quería ser pirata. Y había un pirata que no quería ser niño...el pirata y el niño eran la misma persona.”

In the 1670s our fictional hero, the orphan Roger Rawley, is bound out to Captain Malatormenta. Roger tried to prove himself a real man who was always tough and never cried. After surviving a shipwreck, Roger found himself sharing an island, apparerntly near South America, with a family of religious fanatics who even tried to make peace with the natives. In order to live with them, he has to give up his tough macho-man habits and “be a boy” again.

Many writers and readers would say that this is a story for older readers, and necessarily loses a great deal when cut down to picture-book length. The payoff is that, although El Niño Que Era Muy Hombre was published for children in Spain, it’s accessible to high school and college students learning Spanish as a second language.

In addition to the cartoons, this book also includes a tune to be hummed, whistled, or sung in two-part harmony.

Book Review: Bloom County Classics of Western Literature

(Reclaimed from Blogjob)

Title: Classics of Western Literature: Bloom County 1986-1989

Author: Berke Breathed

Author’s web site: www.berkeleybreathed.com

Date: 1990

Publisher: Little Brown & Company

ISBN: 0-316-10754-9

Length: 250 pages

Illustrations: cartoons by the author

Quote: “[A]t seven I was scanning the ‘News Capsules’ section of the Los Angeles Times. Any head­line including the words FIRE or MURDER prom­ised something vital.”

And so Berke Breathed grew up to write a comic strip in which the characters were children and animals and the plots were headline news stories. For ten years he drew the cartoon daily. Toward the end of this book he announces the transition to drawing it weekly…in news-story mode: the plot line is that Donald Trump’s body has died, his brain has been implanted into the brain-dead body of Bill the Cat, and he’s “developing” Bloom County by firing all the other characters.

http://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-review-classics-of-western.html

This Fair Trade Book was discussed on the Blogspot a few years ago (and, yes, it sold). In view of its timeliness, it’s reappearing here.

In this collection we watch Quiche dump Steve because he spends some time in a body brace, Opus jilt Lola because despite his lovableness he’s just another commitment-phobic 1980s youth at heart, Milquetoast the Cockroach test everybody’s commitment to nonviolence, Oliver blow his cool when asked what led up to the Big Bang, “Deathtongue” morph into “Billy and the Boingers” and expire, the other characters banish Opus from the boardinghouse after hearing a sermon about “penguin lust,” Rosebud admit that the character “he” always insisted was male is “played by” a female (who later gets pregnant), Steve sue Santa Claus for delivering violence-promoting toys, Zygort aliens convert Steve into a Sensitive New Age Guy, Opus try to become a smoker, the kids make (and give away) a fortune selling hair tonic made from Bill’s underarm sweat, Opus attempt to rescue his mother from the Mary Kay Cosmetics test lab, and Ronald-Ann lure Opus from reenacting “Star Trek” to sipping pretend tea with her headless doll. Newsmaking people (and products) are mentioned by name every five or six pages and by implication in almost every strip.

If you don’t remember the original news stories, will you still chortle over every page? Probably. If you don’t get a joke, you’re sure to find someone who can explain it. Real cats don’t have underarm sweat glands; real penguins don’t look like Opus, either. According to the stereotype of the 1980s, Vietnam veterans like John  (the most sensible man in Bloom County) were supposed to be the drugged-out wrecks; in Bloom County that social function is taken over by Bill. But Mary Kay cosmetics, which were marketed by and to church ladies, really were “tested” by torturing animals just like Revlon and Max Factor, and there really were religious conflicts, in some Protestant families, between women (stereotypically the daughters) who boycotted the cosmetics for that reason and women (stereotypically the mothers) who wanted to support fellow church ladies’ business. If he’d had a wife or a sister, Breathed might have been able to exploit the further irony that the real reason why girls like me didn’t buy Mary Kay was that smearing any “moist” stuff on our faces aggravated our acne…unfortunately this comedic element was missing even from the full sequence that was published as Night of the Mary Kay Commandos.

However, as with Pogo and Charlie Brown, the humor of these cartoons is so universal that missing a few topical points wouldn’t keep you from enjoying the book. Steve’s “sensitive” phase was part of a trend, but it’s funny because Steve’s only lovable quality is his complete ignorance of what True Love might be. Opus’s persecution reflects 1980s fear of the influence of the Religious Right, but it’s funny because the children and animals care about each other.

Most of the people who wanted this collection already have it, and now it’s possible to get the five-volume collection of Bloom County reprints here…

http://www.amazon.com/Berkeley-Breathed/e/B000APTBDM/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1444078125&sr=1-2-ent

Posted on October 6, 2015 Categories A Fair Trade Book, HumorTags cartoon, comic strip, Donald Trump, graphic novelLeave a comment

 

Book Review: Osama Tio Sam

Title: Osama Tio Sam 

Author: Eduardo del Rio, "Rius"

Date: 2005

Publisher: Grijalbao

ISBN: 0307274047

Length: 192 pages

Quote: “Es dificil expresarle al Tio Sam el agradecimiento por todo lo que le ha dado al mundo.”

Did the cartoonist known as Rius seriously believe that the evil U.S. government funded the 2001 attacks on the U.S.? Probably not. Did he have a following who expected him to entertain a few conspiracy theories in a way that would make them entertaining even for U.S. readers? Absolutely. Did he have the sort of mind that could do that? Definitely. Did you want to check out the proof while eating or drinking? Definitely not if you'd borrowed the book from a public library. Though far below the comedic standard that made its author internationally famous, this book is still a coffee-snorter.

Rius had just passed age 70. (His drawing hand was slipping, visibly. In 2005 this book made readers sad.) "Communism" had been the religion of his youth. He had never missed a chance to bash the U.S. government or, for that matter, to laugh at the clueless gringos of the North, even in books he wrote with the serious intention of educating his Mexican readers. There was self-parody in his cartoon characters' exaggerated loyalty to all things Mexican (or lack thereof), but underneath the self-parody, yes, he chose to live in Mexico. Conspiracy theories existed in 2001 and it's likely that, underneath the self-parody of this book, Rius thought there might have been something in them. The book is still satire. Rius satirized everything and everybody.

In Osama Tio Sam regular readers recognized Chon and Gumaro and the other "Agachados" characters, but they weren't drawn as well as they used to be. When hand lettering was used the letters were bigger and sloppier than in Rius's earlier books. More of the lettering was done on a computer. The computer allowed more source material to be pasted in. Rius's books had often been collages, with source material copied and pasted in the original languages. (Rius always wrote in Mexican Spanish but often read and quoted things printed in English, French, Italian, and other languages.) His readers apparently welcomed the assumption that they could read material in any language for themselves and needed translations only when Gumaro could translate something into slang in his amusing way. Did they welcome the violence of some of the cartoons pasted into this book? Rius's early books were always provocative, with no sympathy for the richies who kept Gumaro underpaid, but they weren't violent or vulgar. Some of the cartoons pasted into this book are both.

Despite his fluency in English and his U.S. fans, Rius chose not to write in, or have his books translated into, English. If you have the choice, courtesy requires you to use the language of the country you are in. Rius's readers were visiting a fictional town in Mexico and Rius agreed with his character Gumaro, the lovable idealist schoolteacher, that people learn best when lectures target the advanced students, motivating the others to try to catch up. If you wanted to know what his characters were saying you would study Spanish beyond tourist level, would recognize sources and song lyrics and slang. Amazon now offers some translations. I feel that these translations violate the spirit of books in which Gumaro exhorted his audiences to eat a "Mexican" diet of natural corn and beans and pepitas rather than the richies' and gringos' contaminated carne. 

(And yet I find myself remembering that cartoon sequence in the English my mind supplied rather than the Spanish in which it was printed. "What you got against carne," flesh, growls a young woman whose C-cups appear to be struggling to get out of the child-sized T-shirt she's wearing. "Er, um, nothing!" Gumaro blushes, in such a way that you know that, as a good child of the 1960s, he'd eat a possum if one of his students' parents had cooked one, and he'd never withhold the comfort of a manly embrace from a girl who seems to want that as desperately as she needs an adult-sized shirt...but, when he's able to buy his own food with his scanty salary, he's a vegetarian.)

Gumaro was like the young Pete Seeger. You were free to think his politics were a load of toxic waste, but you had to like the misguided young man. And in this book, it seems, Gumaro has been fully convinced of some of the wildest conspiracy theories. 

“The North American people are the least well-informed in the world...they ignore all the things their government does...ignore everything that happens outside of their borders,”'Rius explained in the blurb on the back of the book. He didn't usually bother apologizing to his U.S. readers. He wrote for the sort of people he could trust to roll their eyes, but not take offense, when gringos was used to mean them while americanos was used to mean everyone else but them. That sort of USAmericans can be trusted, also, to accept this accusation. We sort of do ignore what happens outside of our borders. We know it's all being reported in ways that serve people's interests so, unless we know people in a certain country well enough to feel that their interests are ours, our usual response to foreign news does tend to be "Whatever." 

Rius's goal, I think, in confusing William Walker with George Herbert Walker Bush, and similar unlikely "mistakes," was not to say that either Rius or Gumaro knew nothing about the U.S. history being mangled in the book, but to motivate readers to look up the facts in serious books.  Socialism might have worked in Russia if we hadn't pushed them into an unsustainable arms race,  federal employees killed both John and Robert Kennedy, and the West Was Won with the participation of John Wayne...we know he's getting these things wrong, so maybe we'll look them up and get them right.

I think the facts of both the 2001 attacks and the Kennedy murders are bad enough without adding unsubstantiated rumors to them. Rius actually admits, in the text, that his charges of collusion between Osama and Tio Sam are only rumors. So why bother even typing them out? Possibly to review the history of U.S. relations with Mexico; to understand why, when they hear this kind of rumors, some Mexicans would hardly put anything past their Uncle Sam. Our relations with Mexico have been, on the whole, neighborly, but...self-serving. Very very self-serving. 

As when, last year, U.S. corporations wanted to go on making and selling more glyphosate products, despite abundant evidence that glyphosate is making millions of people ill or sick, that glyphosate is the reason why today's youth really have lower median scores than we had at their age, and that glyphosate certainly encourages cancer. But they ran into a problem: Glyphosate has become less useful for its intended purpose every year, as the poison sprays always do, and meanwhile people have become more aware of the harm glyphosate does. A few people really are evil enough to say "Well, if glyphosate actually cripples or kills my neighbors instead of only making them feel discouraged with their gardens, then I ought to be able to acquire their land at even cheaper prices." My neighborhood happens to have been cursed with one of them. But most people would actually prefer to have less breathtaking roses than to "weed'n'feed" their roses with stuff that gives their daughters migraines and makes their grandchildren forget what they've studied on exam day. So...in Europe the farmers say "Send it to Africa," of things they don't want. Some of us say "Send it to Mexico." Not the ones of us who do our own grocery shopping and notice where our fruit and vegetables come from, but, unfortunately, we do allow people who lack that basic life experience to conduct trade negotiations and make deals that depend on Mexicans buying that nasty "Roundup-Ready" corn we no longer want to burn in our car motors. Some of us forget that what goes around in Mexico has a way of coming around here in just a few hours. Possibly the thinking was "At least Mexican people aren't Irish," though some of them are, "so they won't be suffering from celiac sprue," but the reality is that (a) though only people of Irish descent have the celiac gene, people of all ethnic groups can have pseudo-celiac reactions to glyphosate, and (b) people who don't have pseudo-celiac reactions to glyphosate have other reactions, some of which may be more life-threatening. 

Mexicans are quite right to distrust us. People with names like Biden (Bidens are weeds) who demand that Mexicans honor "deals" like that? Mexicans are providing excellent models of civic virtue by letting them live. We should know better than to trust people like that, too. We should insist that our government show due respect to our kind, patient, generous neighbors. 

Book Review: Where I'm Coming From

Title: Where I'm Coming From 

Author: Barbara Brandon-Croft

Date: 2023

Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly (Farrar Straus)

ISBN: 978-1-77046-568-8

Length: 186 e-pages

Quote: "You should know better than to listen to me; I certainly don't."

So few women cartoonists have been syndicated that it was still possible for Barbara Brandon-Croft to be the first Black American woman who had a syndicated cartoon strip. 

She drew the strip only weekly; it wasn't widely syndicated, probably not, for example, appearing in your daily newspaper. I'd seen reprints of some of these cartoons but hadn't seen them printed regularly as a series.

One thing that made the cartoons meaningful was the simplicity of the drawings. Brandon-Croft always showed her characters facing the reader. At first she drew only the faces; then, to make the facial expressions clearer, she started adding hands, sometimes holding something (usually a phone), often detached from the faces as if the characters' shirts faded into the background. 

There were a few extra characters beside the nine regulars and the daughter who accompanied one of them. Two of the extras appear in this book. Men were part of the storyline but were never drawn in the cartoons; women were either talking to them on the phone or talking about them. All nine primary characters were single, although one of them had a daughter. All could be described as baby-boomers; they weren't all the same age, but apparently all grew up in the same neighborhood and had been friends for a long time. 

All were Black left-wingers, though Monica, whose isolation is emphasized by her never appearing in a conversation with the others in this book, usually appeared talking about the fact that she looked White. If there was any more to Monica's story than that, it's not been selected for reprinting in this book. I feel that Monica has been tokenized and discriminated against. She reads, in this book, like a character thrown in because people asked for her, created entirely from reader suggestions, not based on anyone Brandon-Croft really knew. The others seem to have to be based on people Brandon-Croft knew.

The others are Alisha, the sweet spiritual type; Cheryl, the loud, snarky, bossy woman (who is exploited by a boyfriend); Jackie, the emotional one; Judy, the supportive listening friend; Lekesia, the political nut who hardly seems to have time left over for a personal life other than work and activism; Lydia, the mother, usually drawn with daughter in tow; Nicole, the one who knows she's cute and dreads getting older; and Sonya, whom the author described as a "true stand-by-your-man kind of woman" who can stay loyal to her boyfriend because she "don't take no mess" from him, but in this book we don't see her relationship and recognize her as the older one with the wardrobe of hats. 

Many of their expressions of support for each other, their disagreements, their quarrels (as distinct from disagreements), and their demonstrations of enduring and endearing friendship, also happen to be funny. Still, the point of a cartoon series called Where I'm Coming From was to make political statements that represent the group "Black women." They're meant to resonate with readers who are either Black or women, but perhaps even more they're meant to explain things to readers who are neither.

One of the extras, we're told, is a lesbian. In the one cartoon that shows her face, in this book, before Cheryl introduces her Cousin Dee to Alisha, she warns Dee that it's not necessary "to tell the entire world what your sexual preference is," though Dee is feeling infatuated with the liberation of having told her family. On being introduced Alisha says, "Hi. How are you?" and Dee blurts, "I'm gay. How are you?" Well...that minority-within-a-minority was represented. Now, I asked as I looked at that cartoon, what about the conservatives?

But I have to be fair. Brandon-Croft, daughter of cartoonist Brumsic Brandon, grew up in Washington, D.C. In a city where trimming the federal budget instantly brings to mind the un-neighborly idea of taking away the jobs that brought your neighbors to your neighborhood, you don't hear a lot from the conservatives. They're there, but they tend to be more discreet than Cousin Dee. Staying balanced is most easily done on those regular road trips back to the home state. For a minority of Washingtonians the District is their home state...or something. That's a political issue this book does not raise.

Allowing for its political bias, I liked this book and expect most readers will, too, if they let themselves. The characters' expressions are a delight, and their overall solidarity, even when they're quarrelling, is an inspiration.

Book Review: Uncle Shelby's ABZ

Title: Uncle Shelby’s ABZ

Author: Shel Silverstein

Date: 1961

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

ISBN: 0-671-21148-X

Length: pages not numbered

Illustrations: large cartoons (suitable for coloring) by the author

Quote: “[A]lthough Uncle Shelby has never been blessed with children of his own, the little ones have always had a very special place in his tired old heart…I have heard them playing and laugh­ing outside my window while I was trying to sleep and I have thought about them…And so this book—to help all my little friends get all the things in life that they so richly deserve.”

In other words, this book is a collection of mean practical jokes people, mostly older children, have played on innocent young children. The publisher did not recommend sharing it with children. If a child does get hold of it, you’ll need to spend some time demonstrating why all its suggestions are mean jokes…and the suggestion that the child perpetrate any of these jokes on a younger sibling is the meanest of all. I’d break out the serious threat artillery in a case like this. If a niece or nephew of mine were cruel enough to play one of these jokes on a young child, I would go to that niece’s or nephew’s school and demonstrate disco dance steps.

It’s funny for those who are old enough to laugh at a collection of more than thirty mean jokes that wouldn’t work on adults, and that it would be cruel to play on children. They range from a drawing of a lion identified as a dog who likes to be scratched, to a suggestion that if you brush your teeth often and keep them bright and white a predator will find you first in the dark, to a certificate children are advised to turn in at the grocery store to receive a real live pony, to a joke about a travelling salesman who told the farmer “I don’t need to sleep with anybody, I just need directions,” to a recommendation that kids count their fingers while holding their hands over an outline of a six-fingered hand. There’s a smudge on a page identified as where a quarter was supposed to have been glued, if Mommy didn’t pull it off and keep it. Then of course there’s the scrambled alphabet.

The drawing of an oboe (a diabolical suggestion to make to a small child, all by itself) mislabelled as a “gigolo” is one of those multilayered comedic achievements that leave me in awe, like Rush Limbaugh’s famous TV show in which he started to call attention to a math mistake made by a left-winger who’d been laughing at Dan Quayle’s “potatoe” blooper, and then, in mid-attack, Limbaugh proceeded to make a second-grade-level math mistake too. No comedian can be funny on that many levels every day and one might, if inclined to envy, wonder whether either Silverstein or Limbaugh could have been inspired enough to plan such effects, or backed into them by accident. The ancient Romans called it genius, and recognized it as a sort of higher-than-conscious level of the mind.

Uncle Shelby’s ABZ is recommended to those for whom laughing-out-loud-as-therapy works well enough that they never feel all that mean. If you can be satisfied by imagining Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd playing these pranks on each other, this book is for you.

Book Review: How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers

Book Review: How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers

Author: Robert Williams Wood

Date: 1917 (Dodd Mead), 1959 (Dover)

Publisher: Dodd Mead / Dover

ISBN: 0-486-20523-1

Length: 54 pages

Illustrations: woodcuts (and calligraphy) by the author

Quote: “You never hear the Crocus croak.”

The blurb on the Dover edition tells us that Robert Williams Wood was a leading physicist in his day. By 1959 he had become “the late” Professor Wood, and his daughter’s introduction to the Dover edition describes it as “the simple, whimsical humor that was so characteristic of my father.”

“Simple, whimsical humor” pretty much describes this collection of cartoons and poems that play on the names of various plants, birds, and other animals in this “Manual of Flornithology.” We learn the differences between the Burr and the Bird, the Roc and the Shamrock, the Eel and the Elephant, the Elk and the Whelk, and many other pairs (and one trio) of creatures we would never have thought were much alike before...except that Wood has managed to draw them so that each pair looks sort of alike.

The California Quail is said

To have a tail upon his head,

While contrary-wise we style the Kale,

A cabbage-head upon a tail.

It is not hard to tell the two,

The Quail commences with a queue.

It should go without saying that all the jokes are clean enough to share with your grandmother...except that, if you’re my age and lucky enough to have a living grandmother, she probably remembers them. How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers was a bestseller in its day, reprinted 28 times between 1917 and 1932. Even the parents of people my age probably remember this book. Not that they will necessarily mind having a new copy to share with their grandchildren.

Book Review: It All Started with Nudes

Title: It All Started with Nudes

(Amazon had a good clear image of this book's cover but, since it's a cartoon of a nude figure, this web site has chosen to use a truncated, blurry one instead. Click on it to see what the jacket drawing really looks like.)

Author: Richard Armour

Date: 1977

Publisher: McGraw-Hill

ISBN: 0-07-002271-2

Length: 158 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Campbell Grant

Quote: “Since it was hard to hang a picture on the walls of a rocky cave, the Stone Age artist wisely drew pictures on the walls instead.”

Do readers remember Richard Armour? He was America’s family humorist during the mid-twentieth century Best known for short light verses, many of which appeared in Parade (“Shake and shake the ketchup bottle. None’ll come, and then a lot’ll”), he’d written fifty-four books before this one. Seven of those books were jocular looks at history, with almost one joke per line and with titles beginning with It All Started with...In alphabetical order, his historical studies started with Columbus, Europa, Eve, Freshman English, Hippocrates, Marx, and Stones and Clubs: studies of North America, Europe, gender, literature, medicine, politics, and war.

Armour did research for these books, although he wrote them like stand-up comedy scripts. Those facts that weren’t obviously turned into jokes were said to be perfectly accurate. Teachers encouraged students to use the jokes to help remember the facts in passages like:

“According to Herodotus, it took one hundred thousand men twenty years to build the great Pyramid of Khufu. Whether the architect was still alive to collect his fee is not known.”

“The Romans invented mosaics. These were more complementary to building than many Roman portraits were complimentary to their subjects.”

“Leonardo...invented a flying machine and would have been ahead of the Wright Brothers if he had possessed one essential part—some sort of engine."

“El Greco painted religious themes religiously, but his Cardinal Guevara brings out all the meanness and cruelty of this head man of the Inquisition If the Cardinal saw his portrait and failed to have El Greco executed, he wasn’t such a bad fellow after all....He is wearing glasses in the portrait.”

“Thomas Jefferson” [invented] “the swivel chair and the dumb waiter (not the human kind).”

If his comedy could become predictable, at least Armour kept it clean. Despite the cartoon of the nude blonde on the cover, there’s not a rude word and hardly a smutty thought in this book. It All Started with Nudes would not have been a good gift for my grandmothers, who didn’t think even cartooned nudes belonged on the front covers of books, but many people who are active grandmothers now would find it nostalgically sweet and oldfashioned.

To buy it here, send $5 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment to the appropriate address (details are in the "Greeting" post). Four of Armour's "It All Started With" books would fit into one $5 package.

Book Review: Lion

If the book reviewed is not about Torties ("tortoiseshell," black and orange mottled cats), at least it's about felines...

Title: Lion 

Cartoon felines.

Author: William Pene du Bois

Date: 1956

Publisher: Viking

ISBN: none

Length: 36 pages

Illustrations: by the author

Quote: "[O]ne hundred and four artists...made up new animals, which they drew in clear colors. It was in this way that animals were first invented."

And this story is about how an artists' committee designed the lion. Need we say more? Yes: if you're collecting books illustrated by William Pene du Bois, you'll want this one for the collection.

Do even six-year-olds really like that kind and amount of nonsense? The copy I have for sale occupied space in a library for more than thirty years. Generally the wear and tear on a discarded picture book tells how popular the book has been with the read-aloud crowd. This one, apart from the plastic cover and library stamp, seems to be in mint condition. So if you're looking for a picture book to give to a first grade student or read to a kindergarten class, I'd recommend a different one.

Nevertheless, the full-color drawings on every page (sometimes excluding words) are delightful. Probably mostly adults, with a sense of humor and playfulness and with some interest in the artistic process, will enjoy Lion.

It's a collector's item, Gentle Readers. If you want Lion, please send $10 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment, to the appropriate address at the bottom of the screen. (Salolianigodagewi is not a Paypal address; it's the e-mail address from which you get the appropriate Paypal address.) At least five more books of this size will fit into one $5 package. 

Book Review: Tu N'en Reviendras Pas Charlie Brown

Happy New Year, Gentle Readers! For those who've resolved to learn more French, here's a book to encourage you.

Title: Tu N'en Reviendras Pas Charlie Brown

Original English: You'll Flip Charlie Brown

Author: Charles M. Schulz

Translator: anonymous

Date: 1965-67 (English), 1972 (French)

Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston

ISBN: 0-03-086658-8

Length: pages not numbered

Illustrations: cartoons on every page

Quote: "Mon probleme est que je ne me...je ne me sens pas sur...Je ne suis pas capable de..."

In the early 1970s, the "Peanuts" comic strip was so popular, and reprints were selling so well in English, that vintage "Peanuts" cartoons were translated into French and Spanish--half a dozen paperback books in each language. All I need to say to U.S. baby-boomer readers about this book is that it exists. For those who don't already know the "Peanuts" cartoon, here are some extra words.

In this collection, Charlie Brown's perfectly normal insecurity and wishy-washiness begin with his approach to the Kite-Eating Tree (l'arbre mangeur de cerfs-volants) and bid for fashionable psychological reassurance from neighbor kid Lucy Van Pelt (Psychiatre 5 sous), who has a "psychiatric help" stand instead of a lemonade stand...

Lucy confused my generation, but then practicing psychiatrists and psychologists were a bit confused, themselves, about the difference between psychiatric and psychological help. Psychiatrists are doctors who are licensed to prescribe treatments. Psychologists are scientists who study the workings of the human mind. In practice competent psychiatrists, like Sigmund Freud, used to spend a lot of time listening to normal people's talk about their lives, dreams, feelings, decision-making processes or indecisive ditherings, etc., before considering any treatments--which was as it should be, and cardiologists, podiatrists, otolaryngologists, etc., should only take a lot of time to find out what's actually going on before they prescribe treatments too. However, when people like Charlie Brown--a very normal middle school boy with whom millions of people identified--benefit from help talking and thinking through things they don't feel sure about, most of us don't need to pay for a psychiatrist's time. Most of us, as Charlie Brown demonstrated to the world, could be paying a neighbor five cents for the same kind of insights we'd get from paying a psychiatrist hundreds of dollars. In the 1960s and 1970s psychiatrists were raking in money for telling people, "That's normal."

"But what should I do?"

"You'll have to make your own decision."

"Oh, doctor, I'm in such a bind, it's giving me headaches, I..."

"So take aspirin and make another appointment for next week. Oh, and if you need help over the weekend, call Dr. Smith...I'll be in Bermuda."

Those pre-HMO days were palmy days indeed for psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists...and any teenager who had successfully talked a half-dozen friends through "crises" could hope to cash in on a career in psychological counselling. (She says, not without a tinge of regret, having joined Psi Chi just as this stream of potential revenue was starting to dry up in a nationwide backlash Against Therapy.) Little Lucy, obviously having more trouble growing up than Charlie Brown but willing to rent out her attention, could reasonably look forward to a long lucrative career.

The rest of the children and animals Charlie Brown knew were as literate, as sensitive, and as confused by contemporary problems, as Charlie Brown was. Even his dog escaped into a fantasy of being a World War I flying ace (l'as de 14-18).

The concept of a demographic "generation gap," designed to explain why the huge "baby-boom generation" group supposedly had more conflict with our parents than previous generations had in their teens, reached the point of absurdity in families where one sibling was born between 1945 and 1965 and another was older or younger. Many people born during the actual baby-boom years had siblings who belonged to the "silent generation" demographic, and by 1967 little Sally Brown was only slightly ahead of a trend (if Sally was five or six years old in 1967 she was a late baby-boomer) when, dissatisfied with Charlie Brown's help, she wailed "I hate your generation" (Je hais ta generation!").

"Identity crises,"which some people always thought were better described as role confusion, was a fashionable topic. Part of the humor of "Peanuts" was that children and dogs weren't supposed to be as much troubled with "identity questions" as teenagers and young adults, and Schulz convinced us that children did suffer from role confusion--and who knew about dogs? Snoopy, the good-natured beagle who sometimes seemed like a Christ figure, not only had a fantasy past life as a military hero, but worried about the doggy behavior problems he didn't have: "Il y a long­temps que je n'ai pas mordu quelqu'un..." (It's a long time since I've bitten anybody) and, just after he'd shown a lack of interest in chasing rabbits, "Je suis heureux...Je ne comprends pas...Qu'est-ce que je fais de bien?" (I'm happy...I don't understand...What good am I doing?"

Anyone who's lived with a dog or cat has probably noticed that our pets like us to smell like them, at least strongly enough for other dogs and cats to know at a sniff whom we belong to. If your pet is allowed in the bathroom, whether or not it's been trained to take its own little bath in its own little basin, you hardly have a chance to dry off before the animal wants to rub its fur against you. Schulz drew it as a joke, but it's probably true that Snoopy feels insulted by the idea that the children wash their hands after touching the dog. "Touched the dog?!" Snoopy chases Sally through the house. "I'm covered in fleas! Yellow fever! I've got leprosy! I'm covered in germs! I'm poison, I'm death! Beware! I'm sick! I'm contaaagious!" When someone comes to rescue Sally from the back of a chair, Snoopy slinks away thinking, "Touched the dog! Good grief!" I've never doubted, from observing their behavior, that all Listening Pets and some ordinary animals feel that way, which is why I've tried to be more specific in explaining to animals, petting them as I shut them out of the kitchen, "I do love your pretty fur...but I don't want fur in my food." Fur on clothing is a lost cause. Deep down, your dog or cat knows that trying to get out of the house without traces of its scent on your clothes is a way of denying your relationship with it. 

Then there's Lucy, for whom women's liberation has nothing to do with paying her own future bills. Her agenda for little Schroeder, practicing on his toy piano, includes "un wagon, une voiture de ville et une de sport..Notre maison coutera $100,000...J'aurai besoin de six manteaux de fourrure, des robes du soir et des tenues pour le ski, beaucoup de bijoux, les parfums rares et une centaine de paires de chaussures. Il nous faudra une piscine olympique, chauffee, des chevaux, un court de tennis, un immense jardin...Au travail, mon gars!" (We'll need a station wagon, a town car, and a sports car...Our house will cost $100,000...I'll need six fur coats, evening gowns, ski outfits, lots of jewelry, rare perfumes and a hundred pairs of shoes. We'll need an Olympic-sized swimming pool, heated, and horses, a tennis court, an immense garden...Get to work, boy!) No wonder Schroeder, age eight or ten or thereabouts, thinks he doesn't want to marry Lucy at all. When she tells him the celebration of Beethoven's birthday involves kissing a friend on the nose, it's almost enough to change his musical loyalty..."provoquer une ruee vers Brahms!"

Lucy's little brother Linus was originally two or three years old when Sally was born, although in the 1970s they'd become primary school classmates. Linus is, however, bright for his age. One strip reprinted in this book shows him pondering which book to read as he eats a bowl of cereal, with choices including Moby Dick, Bleak House, Joseph Andrews, and The Interpreter's Bible (in twelve volumes), at such length that his cereal gets soggy. For Christmas he gets "une nouvelle bicyclette, un tournedisque, un train electrique, de l'argent, des mitaines, un canife, une veste de ski, un jeu "mystere", des jeux de patience, des chemises de sport et un auto de course...Et tu sais ce que j'ai d'autre? Je me sens affreusement COUPABLE!!"  (A new bicycle, a record player, an electric train, money, mittens, a knife, a ski vest, games, shirts, and a (model) racing car...And you know what else? GUILT!")

The Little Red-Haired Girl, to whom Charlie Brown didn't dare to speak because he had such a crush on her, was talked about not drawn in the cartoons. "Elle est jolie et les jolies filles me rendent toujours tres nerveux" (She's pretty, and pretty girls always make me nervous), he confides to Lucy. Lucy shouts, "Je suis jolie! Pourquoi peux-tu me parler?" (I'm pretty! Why can you talk to me?) Charlie Brown is not able to explain, "Because you're more familiar than my own sister"; he just stumbles away feeling mortified.

Schulz published at least one "Peanuts" cartoon paperback each year for several years. All sold well, and several were translated into languages other than English. Some titles are rarer than others. Current price ranges vary widely. At the time of writing I can offer this one for our usual minimum price of $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment; you could fit six of the thin, but bigger than pocket-sized, French translations into one package and have room for three or four of the pocket-sized English paperbacks.

Book Review: Big Nate in a Class by Himself

A Fair Trade Book

(Note: What I physically own is a booklet that was printed to publicize the full-size books about Big Nate, not the full-size book shown here.)

Title: Big Nate In a Class by Himself

Author: Lincoln Peirce

Author's web site: http://bignatebooks.com/about-the-author

Date: 2010

Publisher: Harper

ISBN: 978-0062283597

Length: 224 pages

Illustrations:  cartoons by the author

Quote: "She always calls on me when I don't know the answer."

For those who've not already seen it, "Big Nate" is a comic strip syndicated in many daily newspapers. Nate is a middle school boy, drawn only slightly taller than his classmates, not a big enough child to be physically intimidating to adults. His problems with being a "big" child are the manageable kind, like being easy for teachers to see and call on. His adventures are consistently funny.

In this book, which contains narrative as well as cartoons, Nate worries about a test. The story has a happy ending. Most parents probably don't need to explain to fourth grade readers that Peirce is trying to suggest that Nate could suffer less test anxiety if he took notes and studied, although somewhere in the Official Rules of Aunthood is a requirement that I mention that. In the full-length book Nate has other things go wrong that day, besides his last-minute test anxiety.

What I physically own is a promotional "trailer" that wasn't even sold, but was given to children with a fast-food selection that had the Orwellian-sounding title of "Happy Meal." The ickiness of the phrase "Happy Meal" guaranteed this book limited circulation and, thus, eventual collectibility. It's seldom easy to predict which collectibles will gain value within the original owner's lifetime, but the mere fact that you can now get the 44-page mini-book Big Nate In a Class by Himself without having to look at a "Happy Meal" shows that it's gained some value, so it may gain more.

For the full-length story, send $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment to the appropriate address at the bottom of the screen--$10 by postal money order to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, or $11 by Paypal to the account address you get by e-mailing salolianigodagewi. For seven different Big Nate books, all containing a mix of regular printed prose and cartoons, send $65 or $66; Amazon may have mixed up data fields--it looks as if, at the time of writing, a brand-new set straight from the publisher costs less than a secondhand set, and if that's true when you order you'll get brand-new books. (For the new set of nine Big Nate books, including two brand-new ones, visit Peirce's web site.) From this payment we'll send $1 per book to Lincoln Peirce or the charity of his choice. 

Book Review: Mother Goose Tells the Truth About Middle Age

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Mother Goose Tells the Truth About Middle Age

Author: Sydney Altman

Date: 2008

Publisher: Ba Boom

ISBN: 978-0-9707275-3-4

Length: 66 pages

Illustrations: color cartoons by Marty Riskin

Quote: "Said Baby Boom Babies / It's time to take stock, / We're too young to get old."

Said Mother Nature and Father Time: "Hoot." Sydney Altman hooted. Here are 46 merry little ditties, each written to be sung or chanted to the tune of a classic nursery rhyme, about middle-aged people getting older. (In between the nursery rhyme parodies are some rhymes that don't fit any particular tune, but if they fit your life you'll probably find a way to sing them.)

"Have you seen the Lipo man?" a woman sitting down asks her svelte friend. And is she about to offer this friend the platter of sugar-dipped bacon, or has she already served one of those "salads" slathered with oil? A few pages later, she's frowning frumpily over the heads of her children at the ex and the pony-tailed girl in the red convertible: "He got a divorce. / He showed no remorse." But a much older-looking lady sitting between two Bright Young Things advises, "Leave your money alone / So you'll look like a crone: / Rich old women attract younger men." 

Hah. Who wants them? Maybe the gal whose bathroom is packed with books whose titles include Your Sagging Self, Is That Your Nose?,Skin: the Later Years, Luggage Under Your Eyes, and Your Body: Good Luck, who whines to the mirror, "I still have a yen / For sex now and then, / But it's young girls who make the men swoon." (She's talking to the mirror out loud, we learn on the next page, because she thinks she sees her mother in it.) A thinner woman, obviously on estrogen replacement, balance-walks on the fence around a construction site and laments, "Wherever I go / I get nary a stare." This woman's male counterpart gets told "Go watch some porn," and falls asleep watching it.

"This baby boomer plays the market," Altman introduces a balding man,"This baby boomer sells by phone," a greying man, "...But this baby boomer, / Still a child of the Sixties, / Grows weed in his geodesic dome." Which 1960s Things should we cherish and which should we bury, anyway? Altman is not overtly taking sides. "Hippity, Dippity, Rock," laments a dowager holding up an annoy-your-parents CD, "I camped out at Woodstock. / But the songs now in style / Are exceedingly vile." A fat, greying man says, "I now see things in a different light. / I vote for conservative candidates / And refuse to engage in political debates," although one of the protesters he's ignoring has a grey beard, receding hairline, and a cartoonish resemblance to baby-boomer Michael Moore.

Then there's the middle-aged man who remembers a time when pop culture was asserting that every normal woman wanted to be flirted with constantly, to the exclusion of any of that intelligent conversation that's probably always been difficult for him: "Mr. Simon was a thigh man / Now he's in despair." His blue-collar coeval  doesn't have a job to lose, so he just "Stood on the corner, / Watching the young girls go by. / When he was younger / He had sexual hunger..." It's not as if the consequences of all that commitment-phobic "liberation" Hugh Hefner used to preach were especially desirable for men: "Fifth wife sees them to their grave, / And then runs off with the money they saved," Altman observes of a perky, top-heavy widow waving across the coffin to a man with a youthful jawline and barely frosted black hair.

For most baby-boomers I observe, although we're all indisputably and definitively middle-aged, the continuum between "old" and "having been an adult long enough to get it right" is a reliable indicator of personal choices. We all eat reasonable diets, despite the industry-encouraged squabbling about whose food choices are "healthier" than whose; people who really live on junkfood, booze, and drugs do sometimes reach age 50 but are seldom ambulatory. (When you see healthy middle-aged and old people--of whom I'm one--enjoying junkfood in public, your default assumption should be that we eat more nutritious food at home. Celiacs eat nuts, chips, and chocs as an alternative to sandwiches and pastries when we have to eat on the road; active and healthy celiacs eat veg and brown rice when we can.) Walking and physical work seem more important than specific diets, of which choices may be determined by genes anyway. While people stay active, their hair turns white on its genetically programmed schedule, but they seem fit and healthy, "middle-aged" not "old." When they have to reduce activity, old age seems to catch up with them.

However, some other aspects of middle age have fallen like the rain on the virtuous and the slothful. "People, when they're fifty / Don't retire as a rule," scowls a stylish black-haired woman standing in a pile of junk cards with messages like "You'll never be young again," "How are your bones?", and "Join the Grey Army" with which AARP and Conservative50+ try to recruit supporters early. An alumna digging up school gear for the reunion can still fit into her school sweater, although it's not as baggy as it must have been when fashionable--but then she looks back through the yearbook: "I wonder who has made it big.../ I've changed my mind / Won't go at all, / I hated school." A white-haired man "read Robert Bly / And beat drums with some guy, / And felt he'd been took for a ride."

Some of these verses rhyme and scan better than others, but the intended effect is comic anyway so, if the lyrics aren't a perfect fit for the tune, that may be an extra source of chortles. All middle-aged people who like to laugh should enjoy this book.

Although the publisher's and illustrator's web site seem to be defunct, the book sold well enough when new that this web site can offer it for our minimum price: $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment, from which we'll send $1 to Altman or a charity of her choice. Four or five copies of this slim book should fit into one package. 

Book Review: Chicken Soup for the Cat and Dog Lover's Soul

A Fair Trade Book



Title: Chicken Soup for the Cat and Dog Lover's Soul

Editor: Jack Canfield

Editor's web site: http://jackcanfield.com/welcome.html

Date: 1999

Publisher: Health Communications

ISBN: 1-55874-710-9

Length: 403 pages

Illustrations: several cartoons

Quote: “When Agnes celebrated her one-hundredth birthday, Mattie” [a dog],” herself a senior citizen and still a regular visitor, came to celebrate...Agnes...stroked the now-grizzled head resting in her lap.”

We all know what to expect from the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series, and this volume shouldn't disappoint anyone. Here are cats, dogs, and also horses and parrots and other companion animals, who defied the odds just by surviving; who gave old people something new to live for; who gave children confidence; who adopted their own smaller animal “pets”; who found humans from whom they'd been separated for years; who warned their humans of danger, one even in a visionary way after the animal was dead; who guided their humans through physical hardships; who summoned help when their humans were injured; whose stories, generally, answer the question “Why do people love other animals so much?”

Snakes don't become real pets—they're probably not wired to feel love or loyalty, and if big enough they're apt to repay those who taught them not to fear humans by eating their human housemates—but most snakes are harmless to humans in any case, and in this book we meet a tame snake who gave a troubled teenager social status.

Rabbits are seldom considered much more emotionally rewarding pets than snakes, but in this book we meet a rabbit who knows when a child could really use a good cuddle.

Ducks are famous for the ease with which they abandon their humans, but in this book we meet a faithful duck who ignores the wild ducks at the pond and, even when the humans try to abandon her, sticks to her human family like glue.

Cows can seem to define insensitivity, as far as humans perceive things—they literally do have skins of cowhide, which allow them to ignore, barely notice, or enjoy several things humans find painful—but here we meet cows expressing one of the emotional reactions they do feel, and express, in a way humans can recognize.

The horse who finishes a race on three legs may not be so heroic by horse standards as he is by human standards. Racing comes naturally to horses and it's not unusual for one horse, or even a whole herd, to run itself off its feet—or over a precipice. What is unusual, probably peculiar to horses that live with humans, is for a horse with a broken leg to be able to survive. Horses' faith in their ability to keep walking on a long difficult trek is another instinct that doesn't always serve horses well “in the wild,” but many a horse has, like one the Duchess of York recalls in this book, encouraged its human to keep going foot, foot, foot, until things get better. Then there's that other horse instinct that appeals so powerfully to humans—the chivalrous instinct with which huge, strong horses not only step over, but protect and comfort, smaller animals; in this book we meet a race horse pulling a 6'6” man off his feet, then quietly nuzzling a child in a wheelchair. Horses are naturally like that, too, though it must be admitted that some horses have stepped on their pet chicken or kitten...and many have stepped on their humans.

Also in this book we meet a squirrel...Rodents often pick up things that look as if they might be useful, then drop those things where they pick up food. The “pack rat” or “trader rat” is so called from its tendency to drag in, and drop, something whenever it raids a human's food supply. It can look as if the little fellows imagined that the things they carried in, which can be anything from weed seeds to antique gold watches, were payments for the food they ate and carried out. In this book we meet a squirrel who gives a friendly human an ornament. The squirrel's thinking may well have been “This is not a nut; I've never figured out what it is, or what it's for; why not see what the human does with it.” Then again, how can humans be sure that the squirrel's thinking was not “Here's something the human will like; I'll offer it to her by way of thanks for her help.”

Parrots' ability to mimic human speech is proverbially an example of meaningless noise, yet parrots do unmistakably learn, along with the sounds of human words, the contexts in which humans say them. All the “talking birds” are notoriously more likely to learn naughty words than nice words. As a child I grew up hearing stories of a parakeet who had lived with my parents before I was born, who seemed to know everybody's name—certainly his own and his less gifted mate's—and learned in just one afternoon to repeat “You come here, you stinker, you!”, but despite several attempts to teach him the phrase it took a crisis to get him to repeat, “Mommy loves the baby bird.” (And why not? He knew he was a full-grown daddy bird, of a small species, but not a baby.) As an adult I've learned that, although keeping caged birds as pets is out of fashion these days, among people who live with birds that story is still familiar. The version of it found in this book may be especially special. Parrots aren't sentimental and most of them, most of the time, probably hold a low opinion of even their favorite humans' tastes and intelligence, but when life prods them, it seems, they'll admit they are fond of their humans.

Dogs and cats whose reactions alert humans to danger are perhaps another familiar story. Cynical readers have observed for a long time that a more newsworthy, equally true, story might be one along the lines of “While the building burned Wuffles, the manager's dog, was apparently fast asleep.” The animals have naturally keen senses and normally will notice things before humans do, but there's nothing supernatural about their sensitivity—a nervous pet will alert its humans to every train that rolls along a railroad half a mile away, and a calmer pet may indeed expect its humans to be taking care of everything while the house burns down. Still there is a very solid body of true stories of pet animals knowing when to give the alarm. The one in this book is especially special. The dog doesn't merely bark or howl...

Included in this book are a few familiar animal legends; Jim the Wonder Dog, who in the late 1920s astounded people by “answering” almost any question anyone asked him (some dogs are fantastic body-language readers), and Greyfriars Bobby, who slept on his dead human's grave for years, and one of James Herriot's clients' sweetest pet cats. Here, too, are Socks and Buddy from the White House. However, most of the stories are new, contributed by “Chicken Soup” readers, who have traditionally been invited either to send in their own stories or to nominate published stories they've read.

"Chicken Soup" books sell fast and turn up as used books fast, so you might as well buy them here. Other sellers may offer better prices but when you buy Fair Trade Books here, usually for $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment, we send $1 to the author or a charity of his or her choice. Four "Chicken Soup" books, including the earlier title Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul, should fit into one package for $25 or $26, and if you order four of them, Jack Canfield or his charity will receive $4 (assuming, of course, that his charity accepts $4 payments).