Animal Tales in Critical Cross Hairs

FOCUS: Re­views and es­says about an­imal books.

An Animal Dilemma for Children to Solve

Mi­chael Pol­lan proves to be ver­sat­ile enough to de­vise two ver­sions of The Omnivore’s Di­lemma: the ini­tial one, sub­titled A Nat­ural His­tory of Four Meals, writ­ten for adults and a second one, sub­titled The Secrets Be­hind What You Eat which is an abridged and re­writ­ten Young Read­ers Edi­tion, meant for a ju­ven­ile audi­ence. Of course, in the lat­ter ver­sion the dis­turb­ing de­tails of … Read on …

Scary ones, darling ones

Illustration for Ioana Valean’s article ”Scary ones, darling ones”. Collage by Adrian Otoiu.

Some of you might be re­pelled by such a sub­ject. If it is so, my ad­vice for you is not to judge a book by its cov­ers, but to read it closely, as you may never know who you’ll fall in love with. You will never know what sim­il­ar­it­ies you can find between your­self and the creatures that scare you. Read on …

A Voiceless Trumpeter

E.B. White’s tale of a wild trum­peter swan born without a voice cel­eb­rates his love of wild­life and the out­doors. A story of ac­cept­ance and of choos­ing kind­ness, that cap­tiv­ates young read­ers and makes them ac­cept dis­ab­il­ity and dif­fer­ence. Read on …