Book-value

The "Little Boy Books for Beginning Readers" are written by Bill Cosby to play up the value of friendships and family relationships while also encouraging children to solve the problems they face in fair and creative ways. Each book is dedicated to Cosby's son Ennis, who was tragically murdered, which adds poignancy to these stories for older readers. For beginning readers it is the validity of the point being made in these stories, that are set in a fairly realistic world, that will matter. These books, which are illustrated by Varnette P. Honeywood, are intended for ages 6-10, which shows that beyond being for beginning readers they are intended to teach important lessons.

In "Shipwreck Saturday" Little Bill has been working very hard on a sailboat, which he has named "The Moby Dick." His big plans for Saturday are to take his boat to the park so he can sail. However, first his friends all make fun of his boat and then when he sails it something happens and it ends up breaking. Little Bill is so upset and so afraid that his friends will see what happened and make fun of him that he not only runs home without his boat, he leaves both his lunch and his brother behind.

Cosby, of course, is one of America's most beloved comedians, whose humor has always come out best in the stories that he tells about his own childhood (remember "To Russell, My Brother, With Whom I Slept"?) and raising his own kids (remember the routine from his concert film that he turned into the pilot for "The Cosby Show"?), and he does the same thing here. At the park Little Bell sees Kiku and her grandmother doing some origami, the Japanese art of paper folding. Of course, as if often the case with such stories, Kiku and her grandmother are going to help Little Bill's spirits soar in the wake of his boating disaster as young readers again see how creativity can transform a painful experience.

As child psychiatry specialist Dr. Alvin Poussaint points out in his letter to parents at the start of the book, there is another important aspect to the story of "Shipwreck Saturday" in that it speaks to the days of yore, when children actually made some of their own toys either by building models from kits or by using their imagination on materials found around the house (I remember making our G.I. Joes into Knights of the Crusade using paper towel tubes, tinfoil, cloth from an old pillowcase, and a red marker). Poussaint makes a good argument for the value of children building homemade toys, even if from a kit. As Poussaint points out, we would be surprised if Little Bill was as upset about what happened to his boat if it had just been something he picked up at the toy store and even beginning readers should react to the idea that there would be something special about such a toy.

Jim Eggert weaves a simple yet compelling story of why we should highly value our environment in determining the economic well-being of our society. He highlights how the GDP (gross domestic product) does not account for the value of the wonderful song of the meadowlark when a change in farm crop harvesting (which does positively increase our GDP) wipes out the meadowlarks brooding habitat. This example, along with many other delightful essays, make this book a fantastic read.

Rick Moody is one of the most highly regarded young novelists in America today (the New Yorker included him in its list of the "20 best young American writers") and, as such, his first editions have come to have value in the collector's market. Moody has taken the principal vehicle for selling such first editions -- the modern rare book dealer's catalog -- and created what can only be called a novella in the form of a dealer's catalog -- a hilarious and touching self-contained world, where the values accorded to the items for sale (i.e., dollars) and the values inherent in them (i.e., their significance, artistry, passion) are continually surprising and challenging to the reader and range from the sublime to the ridiculous and all points in between. Moody has his tongue in cheek at all times, but wears his heart on his sleeve, too, and many of these items represent or embody a kind of sensitivity and tenderness that this reader found surprisingly touching in such an essentially comic take-off. Anyone who has ever enjoyed reading a rare book dealer's catalog will find this to be an extraordinary trip -- familiar, odd, even at times haunting. (I have to admit that I gave people reason to snicker by trying to order an item from it when I got my copy in the mail.)

The illustrations are beautiful. The text is well written and easy for the beginner or the experienced card reader.

My daughter, age 3 1/2, have thouroughly aenjoyed this book. NOt oly is the story fun but it teaches an important value, telling the truth. The illustrations are beautiful and fun to look at. I highly recommend it!

This is a great little book. The pictures are very colorful and interesting. My kids have all liked this book when they were little. My two year old likes finding and pointing to each animal as it comes out of the tent. Also, there is a part in the book where kids can read along..."Come on in".

Somewhat like the Magician's Apprentice in Fantasia, this book delights in relaying the dangers of meddling in magic. A wonderful tale of a cat whose wizardly master leaves her home alone, and she proceeds to conjure up all sorts of trouble! Those who are out of the "suggested reading" age will still love the fantastic artwork.

Timid Timmy is a warmly written story by Andreas Dierssen for young readers about a very timid little hare who wishes he could be like his daring and fearless friend Rocket. But then Timmy learns what true courage and bravery is. Timid Timmy is a playfully drawn and colored picture book with a meaningful message at its heart which is very highly recommended for young readers.

Madeleine L'Engle is a wonderful woman who has her own thoughts about faith and religion that prove to be close to the heart. I recommend this book if you are open to learning about your own faith potential, if you love children's books, or if you love eating chocolate jelly beans. Please take me seriously! This book is one I want to have for myself so I can be reminded over and over how children's authors take special care to incorporate faithful things for children to consider.

Leon Pompa (University of Birmingham) said that "This translation will undoubtedly constitute a landmark in Vico studies in view of the way in which they have developed over the last half-century. A striking feature of this development is its concentration on Vico later works, i.e. the various versions of the New Science, and to some extent his earlier work, particularly its implications for educational theory, to the almost complete exclusion of the mass of philosophical and juridical work that he published between 1720 and 1722, namely the Synopsis of Universal Right, The One Principle and the One End of Universal Right, The Constancy of the Jurist, and the two sets of Notes and Dissertations. There are two obvious reasons for this omission. One is the sheer complexity and difficulty of the texts themselves. The other is that, given the eclectic nature of Vico's sources, an appreciation of his doctrines requires a knowledge of the theological, jurisprudential and poetic context which many historians and philosophers simply lack. As a result the enormous body of work contained in this translation has largely been by-passed as a staging post in Vico's journey to the theories of the New Science rather than being considered as something worthy of study in its own right. This is highly regrettable because, although it is unarguable that many of Vico's later doctrines are pre-figured in Universal Right, they also appear there in ways so significantly different as to raise serious questions of interpretation and critical evaluation. For example, although the theory of poetic characters appears in Universal Right, it is not there accompanied by any mention of the imaginative universal which features so prominently in the New Science and which, at one point in it, to the confusion of many commentators, is identified with a poetic character. This must raise the question whether the identification was a further development of the theory or simply a mistake. Again, Universal Right is markedly more rationalist than the New Science, which is often interpreted as a completely anti-rationalist work. Thus where, in Universal Right, Vico attempts to deduce the legitimacy of various social and political functions from God, in the editions of the New Science, he supports them by an appeal to the nature of the human mind. This difference must raise questions about the ways in which Vico's metaphysical thought changed, the extent to which it changed and, of course, whether it ought to have changed in those ways. But apart from these and many other questions internal to understanding Vico's thought that attention to Universal Right raises, there is a further and quite different reason why it ought not to suffer from its current neglect: that it is by far the most important contribution he made to jurisprudential thought as such. Though this contribution was studied in the nineteenth century, it has yet to be studied in the context of modern research into legal theory. Such research will not merely provide a re-assessment of Vico's contribution to jurisprudential theory but, reciprocally, that of the jurisprudential theory of his time. This long-awaited first English translation of Diritto Universale (Universal Right) provides, therefore, an invaluable opportunity to begin upon a rethinking both of many features of current Vico research as well as the history of jurisprudence. The translations themselves are extremely literal and, if this makes them slightly awkward at times, it also makes them very accurate. Given the difficulties of the text, this alone constitutes a major achievement. In addition to the main works cited above, however, the volume contains a mass of supplementary contextual material. This includes translations of helpful letters, summaries of older-now difficult to obtain-Italian commentaries on some of Vico's jurisprudential doctrines, and of such modern discussions as exist, and a truly enormous amount of scholarly material and notes on Vico's sources, the nature of distinctions drawn in the juridical context within which he was working and, to some extent, the nature of his own thought. Amounting, in effect, to a comprehensive commentary on this whole work, to which there is nothing remotely comparable elsewhere, this material, supported by an outstandingly comprehensive analytic index, cannot fail to be of enormous assistance to scholars interested in any of the above-mentioned fields of research. The whole publication thus represents a huge achievement for which its authors are to be congratulated. ... no library which aims to support research into Vico or into the history of eighteenth-century jurisprudential thought in general can afford not to possess a copy of it. " (from The Journal of Eighteenth Century History)