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Young doodlers and dreamers of the world, take heart--the famous Dr. Seuss, creator of Whos and Sneetches, was a doodler and dreamer, too. Kathleen Krull's engaging picture-book biography of Ted Geisel, the real Dr. Seuss, takes us from his early childhood on Fairfield Street in Springfield, Massachusetts, to the time when he's 22 years old in Greenwich Village and just starting to think he might make a go of it as a person who draws flying cows. Krull tells a lively story, carefully including details that help us understand how Seuss became Seuss, from playground injustice (Geisel was a German American and World War I loomed large) to his love for Krazy Kat comics.
Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher, who also illustrated Seuss's My Many Colored Days, cast Seuss's childhood in a nostalgic light with lovely, old-fashioned paintings. A four-page section in the back picks up Seuss's story again, taking us to 1937 when he launches his children's book career with And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and all the way to his death in 1991. A complete list of Seuss's books and recommendations for further research closes this fascinating look at one of America's most beloved creators of children's books. (Ages 8 and older) --Karin Snelson
Book Description
Award-winning author Kathleen Krull zeros in on the formative first 22 years of the life of Ted Geisel. This is the first picture book biography of Dr. Seuss, written especially for his young fans who want to know what made him tick. The animals in the zoo that his father ran and his fondness for drawing them, the injustices he suffered as the child of German immigrants, and his inherent sense of humor all fed into the imagination of this boy. He was a square peg in a round hole until he found that he could make a living doing exactly what he pleased—doodling and writing funny things about the world as he saw it.
The last section of the book outlines the important events in his adult life. In addition to the evocative paintings by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher, the book is profusely decorated with art from Dr. Seuss books.
Customer Reviews:
An American Icon.......2006-03-03
This is a wonderful biography to share with children and adults. A poll of any group of readers about their favorite books will ALWAYS come up with Green Eggs and Ham and The Cat in the Hat. Ted Geisel's work is loved.
Kathleen Krull describes the events in his early life that became part of his work and interests later. His lifelong love of animals, his shyness, his sense of justice and fairplay were outgrowths of his boyhood on Fairfield Street in Springfield, MA.
Geisel's boyhood was filled with fun and adventure but he was always slightly out of step with the rest of the world. He was a kid who preferred drawing crazy animals to studying. As the son of German immigrants, he was mocked and bullied. He had a three-legged dog. He wrote and drew under pseudonyms.
The book follows his childhood and college days and ends with Ted striking out on his own, as an illustrator and cartoonist in Greenwich Village.
The paintings by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher seem to just glow and invite the reader to keep turning the pages.
I read this book to many classes as it was a Bluebonnet title but this is not a book you can just breeze though. There is much to discuss and digest. Without fail, the kids are outraged when Ted is shorted his medal for selling war bonds in an embarrassing presentation by former President Theodore Roosevelt. They are thrilled when Ted draws on the walls of his room and does NOT get in trouble. They examined the illustrations closely. I shared the book with at least 10 classes before I noticed (thanks to a sharp-eyed student) Ted's three legged dog is featured on the cover of the book. The kids also enjoyed picking out the tiny Seuss images on the corners of the pages.
There is a comprehensive "rest of the story" at the end of the book with details about his later life.
This is a lovely tribute to an American icon.
If you know kids who are fans of books by Theodore Le Sieg (The Eye Book, The Foot Book, Ten Apples Up on Top, Wacky Wednesday) have them spell Le Sieg's name backwards after you finish this book.
Good reading skills or parental assistance required.......2004-06-12
It's hard to know where to place this biography of Ted Geisel: Boy On Fairfield Street reads with the action and drama of fiction, yet is a bona-fide account of how Geisel grew up to become Dr. Seuss. Paintings by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher accompany a lively discussion of how Geisel got his ideas. Good reading skills or parental assistance required for this in-depth biographical survey.
Unique Children will Love this book!.......2004-04-10
Do you know a child who feels out of step with the rest of their class? How about one that seems to annoy their teacher because they see the world differently? This biography was made for them!
Dr. Suess seemed to frustrate his teachers as his drawings were so different from all the other children in his class - in this book, readers will learn that he reveled in his uniqueness and embraced his unusual view of the world. As a result, he was able to find success as a cartoonist -- though it did take time.
The biography isn't just for little kids, but could be gifted to any "child" who needs to feel proud of their uniqueness.
Do you hear a drum beat that no one else can hear? Be glad you do -- you might grow up to be as successful as Dr. Suess.
Seuss-on!.......2004-02-08
A great biography for the under-12 crowd, The Boy on Fairfield Street is beautifully illustrated and tenderly written. From Ted's experiences with bullies to a humiliating experience with former President Theodore Roosevelt, Krull has shown the reader Ted's common failings as well as his extraordinary perseverance. Disappointing, however, is the short-stop ending just after Ted moves to New York at 22, before any of his famous children's books were written. There is an additional four page narrative but it is not fully illustrated as the rest of the story is and may leave some children cold unless they have help to get through it. Overall, a wonderful book that is just perfect for a celebration of Dr. Seuss's birthday on March 2 or a celebration of this year's Seussentennial.
Customer Reviews:
A gift of a life: Odyssey of a Romanian Street Child.......2005-04-24
I don't think I could ever be too thankful to Mr Dobrisan and Mr Kachelmyer. Sounds too good for a critic? I must start by saying that this book was given to me as a present by Mr Kachelmyer himself and sent by post to his expense. So yes I could be a little biased.
A street child tells his life.
This is the story of a Why? Why he became a street child, why he lived as a street child and why he could be rescued. This question haunts this book in two dimensions: a road of self discovery and a message for us. In both dimensions the book fails, but not utterly; the writer being sincere is humble enough to accept that our wisdom on human nature is limited yet it wonderfully succedes at giving us hints. Sometimes, on a first thought, I came to think that Catalin, our hero, sounded like a TV preacher but then I relized that there are many ways to do Theology. One is the theoretical approach done in a desk and the witnessing of the vital experience of a loving God who comes to meet us. Catalin lacks in the former, repeating coined words and expressions but, in the name of Jesus, how vibrant, how refreshed how resurrected they are in his lips. If only, or better, when, Catalin will be able to find out his own words, to develop his own theology and anthropology. I pray God will give him that grace.
This is also the story of a How? To be honest, before reading this book I was much more interested in this aspect than in the "Why?". Here the book works quite well. Certainly it is not Shakespeare, just plain English yet if effectively shares his life with us. I only have a desiderata if a second edition were to be made: a "24 hours in the life of a street child" How a typical day, week and year of a street child is. Please keep the plain style, it adds to honesty.
This is *not* all folks!
What's God for a street child? It seems to me that very few has been written on this subject. Mr Kachelmyer's work is not based on the method of phenomenology (sorry for the periphrasis, my limited English is showing) but an experiential account of his findings and reflections. Is it good or bad? No idea, sorry. I have no experience to compare to his. Yet I can tell you this, everything Mr Kachelmyer says smells to Gospel and Psalms, to proverbs and wisdoms.
And yet there is more.
The last two chapter of this book are the condensed wisdom of a man who wants to share it with future workers with street children. That he gave them free to me, a mere wanna be, tells a lot about his character...
Last but not least a short quote
"I told Alex that he had not exactly handled the situation with his biological father as the Bible recommends, but that if he had any trouble with the Lord over it, I would stand with him on the Day of Judgment,"
to which I add, count me in for the defendant party :)
Context: When Alex (another child) asked his parent why he had abandoned him, his parent smacked him to which Alex replied in kind.
Buy this book? Next Question! :)
Warning
This book is written by a Christian who is not ashamed of it in a little bit, if that's a problem for you, don't buy this book :)
worth every leu.......2004-02-17
I just got this book as a gift not three days ago. I read it in a single afternoon. I have to warn you that this is not an easy read. The writing is very simple and easy to understand, but the story is a difficult one to swallow. It is a frank account of the lifestyle of street children, and it is not pretty. I have seen these street kids in cities all over Romania. They are haunting images of neglect. Do not read this book of you are not prepared to have your heart broken.
Interesting and Informative Book.......2003-05-26
I have been to Romania and know something about the plight of the Romanian street children. This book's "been there, done that" account of living on the street was very interesting. It helped fill in the gaps in my understanding of the problem. It clearly explains why the street children exist, about their awful living conditions, about successes and failures working with street children, and more. I highly recommend this book to anyone who would like to learn more about Romanian street children.
Book Description
Tommy Webber is nine years old when his father, a founding minister of the East Harlem Protestant Parish, moves the family of six from a spacious apartment in an ivy-covered Gothic-style seminary on New York City's Upper West Side to a small one in a massive public- housing project on East 102nd Street. But it isn't the size of the apartment, the architecture of the building, or the unfamiliar streets that make the new surroundings feel so strange. While Tommy's old neighborhood was overwhelmingly middle class and white, El Barrio is poor and predominantly black and Puerto Rican. In Washington Houses, a complex of over 1,500 apartments, the Webbers are now one of only a small handful of white familes.
Set during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Flying over 96th Street: Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy is the story of one boy's struggle with race, poverty, and identity in a city -- and a country -- grappling with the same issues. Tommy's classmates at the exclusive Collegiate School for Boys, which he attends on scholarship, dare not venture above the city's Mason-Dixon Line of 96th Street into the unknown territory of muggers, gangs, and junkies. Tommy, however, slowly makes new friends on the local basketball courts and at church, and discovers a different East Harlem, one where an exuberant human spirit hides within the oppressive projects and drab tenements, fighting to break through the cracked sidewalks. Webber interweaves the nation's growing Civil Rights movement -- from watching on television the forced integration of Little Rock's Central High School to participating in the famous 1963 March on Washington -- with the subtler, more immediate changes he observes in the lives of his friends and neighbors.
In simple yet compelling prose, lit by the candor and innocence of childhood, Webber brings to life his East Harlem: children playing under gushing fire hydrants; the piraguas man and his pushcart of rainbow-colored icies; Fourth of July barbecues on rooftops; heated games of 5-2 on the public school courts; streets teeming with ugliness, anger, and despair, but also alive with color, community, and hope.
Customer Reviews:
Most Moving Memoir.......2004-12-22
Flying over 96th Street is the most moving memoir I have ever read. It tells the story of a white young boy growing up in Spanish Harlem durnig the 50s and early 60s and how he and his new black and Puerto Rican friends grow to appreciate, help, teach, and love each other. It is a totally absorbing account of coming of age and should be read by every high school student in america.
Moving, Empathetic Memoir .......2004-10-13
Webber's portrait of New York in the 1950s and 60s is full of vivid description. He captures the sounds and smells of his neighborhood and, more importantly, draws his characters with an empathetic brush. Yet the book is not just an elegy to a time past. Dr Webber deals deftly and incisevely with class, race and prejudice, while never preaching or teaching. Every page is full of delights. It is a deeply touching book that will rank as one of the great New York City memoirs.
Meaningful lessons on coming of age, race, identity and love.......2004-10-05
Flying over 96th Street encourages the reader to examine race and relationships. It challenges the reader to look beyond the color of one's skin and examine what happens when you allow yourself to trust and love others who neither look like you or who at first glance seem so different.
A must read for those yearning to explore their relationship with others - and a exceptional message for young people - encouraging them to reach beyond their small circle, embrace and take the risk to love others who "appear" so different.
A Great (and important) Story.......2004-09-26
Flying Over 96th Street is a great read. Tom Webber tells his story in with humor and remarkable powers of observation. As a New Yorker, I loved the details of "El Bario".. But you don't have to be a New Yorker to get into the experience of this young guy who goes "beyond the looking glass" of the white middle class world into another reality-- where HE is the minority...
Even though race and class is rarely (if ever) being discussed nationally, it is a core issue of who we are as Americans. And for those of us who talk about it, it is often just that-- talk. Kudos to the generations of the Webber family who put their neighborhood where their mouth is...
Much to learn from this story.......2004-09-24
An amazing book about a white boy growing up in East Harlem --with his family the only white family in the projects where they live. Vivid and touching, personal and curiously global, like The Color of Water, you get an insider's view of a biracial community and feel powerfully the great strengths and the huge challenges facing this community and white/black relations. I highly recommend to anyone interested in New York, in race relations and in human relationships.
Product Description
Set in the 1940s, Elaine Soloways memoir takes its title from the street that Studs Terkel exalts in his classic book, Division Street: America, and from the pet name her father gave her. Soloway lived in a three-room flat above her familys grocery store. In her tale of bookies, poolrooms, sidewalk playgrounds, and relatives who lived down the block, we learn about her loving but embattled parents, her adored older brother, and neighborhood kibitzers. Along with her recollections of a lively, unique community, she also shows the underside of childhood and urban life. Although far from the Holocaust and the war overseas, Soloway faced dangers close to home when a child her age was horribly murdered, and when predators preyed on voiceless little girls. As Soloway struggled to find her own identity, the family store and Division Street waged battles too: for post-war prosperity, television, supermarkets, and suburbia threatened an end to corner storesand to old neighborhoods everywhere.
Customer Reviews:
Delightful and moving.......2006-11-16
I have to echo all the other five star reviews here, added by Soloways or not. This is a well-written, engaging, moving story of a child's life growing up in Chicago. I read it in one gulp.
This book would make a great movie!.......2006-07-16
I read Divison Street Princess and loved every page. SOloway writes wonderfully, and evokes a certain America magically, she has created a very important memoir.
I feel the book is so important in Americana culture and Jewish-Americana cultural archives, that the book should eventually be entered onto an online Internet site, free of charge, so that readers in the future, and I mean the FUTURE, like 500 years from now, can also read this moving memoir! Also, this would make a great movie in the Barry Levinson vein of Hollywoodiana. The murder of the little girl and the arrest of the murderer would make a fantastic 1950s Chicago movie story, with Soloway's memoir bookending the movie on both sides.
Timeless--A Treasure.......2006-06-12
I was drawn into this wonderful book by the details of daily life in 1942 as seen, in the first pages, through the eyes of a four-year-old child. And I stayed with delight to absorb that little girl's increasingly acute awareness of family, friends, neighbors, and the urban neighborhood itself, as she grew into her early teens. The way in which the reader comes to know and ultimately care deeply about the parents, Min and Irv Shapiro, and the future of the family is especially satisfying. While the time and the place are unique, I believe that everyone of any age will find something familiar in this lovely memoir.
UNVARNISHED, WARM. AND LOVING!.......2006-05-15
Author Elaine Soloway remembers Chicago in the 'forties as the best of times and the worst of times. Now in her sixties, she presents an unvarnished, microscopically precise yet warm and loving account of growing up in a supportive Jewish family above her family owned mom and pop grocery story in Chicago's Humboldt Park.
The author remembers/reconstructs every detail--how her parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors spoke, dressed, worried, loved, and argued--as the world of their Jewish enclave was dissolved by the drip, drip, drip of postwar mobility. She notes, "Television, suburban backyards, and supermarkets were draining our close-knit block of its friendliness, its familiarity."
Soloway's excellently written account will bring back the past for those of us who shared the same time and place. For those who did not, it will serve as a valued lesson on how we got from Chicago in the 'forties to the Chicago of today and what we gained and at what cost.
--Lowell Streiker
author of The Old Neighborhood: Memories of a Chicago Childhood--1942 to 1952.
A Great Read.......2006-05-15
The book brought back so many memories from the old neichborhood. It is a good book for all ages.
Book Description
Like the majority of children living in the global South today, a large number of Vietnamese youths work to help support their families. International human rights organizations have focused on these children, seeking to bring their lives into line with an understanding of childhood that is generally accepted in the developed world.
In this ethnographic study, Rachel Burr draws on her daily observations of working children in Hanoi and argues that these youngsters are misunderstood by the majority of agencies that seek to support them. Most aid programs embrace a model of childhood that is based on Western notions of individualism and bountiful resources. They further assume that this model is universally applicable even in cultures that advocate a collective sense of self and in countries that do not share the same economic advantages.
Burr presents the voices and experiences of Vietnamese children in the streets, in a reform school, and in an orphanage to show that workable solutions have become lost within the rhetoric propagated by aid organizations. The reality of providing primary education or adequate healthcare for all children, for instance, does not stand a chance of being achieved until adequate resources are put in place. Yet, organizations preoccupied with the child rights agenda are failing to acknowledge the distorted global distribution of wealth in favor of Western nations.
Offering a unique, first-hand look at the experiences of children in contemporary Vietnam, this book also provides a broad analysis of how internationally led human rights agendas are often received on the local level.
Average customer rating:
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Galloway Street
John Boyle
Manufacturer: Transworld
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 Irish
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ASIN: 0552999148
Release Date: 2002-09-24 |
Book Description
This is a book about exile and belonging -- a truthful, funny and moving evocation of a unique place and time, xperienced through the eyes of a child.
John Boyle was born and raised in Scotland but he never felt Scottish. His parents were immigrants from the west of Ireland who came to Scotland to find work, and eventually settled in Paisley where John was the first of six children.
Galloway Street beautifully captures the poverty and the rough humour of the Boyle family’s life in the Paisley tenements, the songs and stories of their Irish Catholic relatives and the often uneasy relationships with their Scottish Protestant neighbours. He also reveals how a trip at the age of ten to visit an aunt on the remote island of Achill was his first introduction to the life his parents left behind.
Customer Reviews:
Scotish Angela's Ashes.......2002-03-30
The Scottish Version of Angel'a Ashes, set in Paisley instead of Limerick, but the same view of growing up in a poor family through the eyes of a young boy. Down to earth , but still funny.
Book Description
As kinship relationships and support networks across family lines weaken with modernization, economic stressors take a great toll on children. Kenya, like some other nations in Africa and around the globe, has witnessed a rapid rise in street children. The street children in Nairobi come from single parent families which are mostly headed by women. Another group are AIDS orphans. This study documents how street children in Nairobi follow survival strategies including (for boys) collecting garbage, and (for girls), prostitution. Gender is emphasized throughout the book. Although impoverished families are the most likely to produce street children, not all poor families have their children on the streets. The problem of street children is a complex one that calls for a comprehensive and coordinated policy and program for intervention at all levels and in all sectors of society. Alleviating poverty and rebuilding the family institution should be among the first steps in addressing the problem.
Average customer rating:
- The best description of Southern society and culture.
- Classic, you don't know Faulkner until you've read this book
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My Brother Bill (Hill Street Classics)
John Faulkner
Manufacturer: Hill Street Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1892514001 |
Customer Reviews:
The best description of Southern society and culture........2003-06-06
John Faulkner succeeded capturing the South better than any author I have read. I grew up near his location and in a family with the same moral and cultural values of his. His family could have been mine. If you want to travel to the South that used to be, that our families helped build after the Civil War and before Korea this is the best way I know to do it. His frugal use of words and his short sentences only add to the authenticity of his descriptions. For those of us from there he brings to life,as none other, what used to be and is to never be again.
Classic, you don't know Faulkner until you've read this book.......2000-03-20
A wonderful stylist, John tells the intimate story of the Faulkner family that no biographer or academic could. You simply don't know Faulkner until you've read this book.
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