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  • The Spring List*
  • Robert G. Miner Jr. (bio)
Tinker and the Medicine Man by Bernard Wolf. (Random House, $4.95). Illustrated.
The "Snoopy Come Home" Movie Book by Charles Schulz (Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, $6.95). Illustrated.
Firegirl by Gibson Rich. (Old Westbury, New York: Feminist Press, $1.95). Illustrated.
Nothing But a Dog by Bobbi Kutz. (Old Westbury, New York: Feminist Press, $1.50). Illustrated.
Where Do Babies Come From: A Book for Children and Their Parents by Margaret Sheffield (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, $3.95). Illustrated.
Twist, Wiggle, and Squirm: A Book About Earthworms by Laurence Pringle. (Thomas Y. Crowell, $3.75). Illustrated.

If what a culture really cares about is what it tries to pass on to its children, then our culture is even more shallow and mindless than many have feared.

At least this seems true if this Spring's crop of new children's books is anything to go by. There are scads of sappy biographies, writ clean, presumably to protect their readers from human excess, weakness, misery and depth. And phony nostalgias about that grand old Pennsylvania Dutch farm we all used to know full of cheerful, simple chubby folk, overeating, and bland, thigh-slapping good humor. And slick books of heroic proportions about clean-living sports heroes we all of course worship. What we really care about, apparently, is today's gladiators, yesterday's lies, and colorless, plastic living.

There are exceptions, though. Tinker and the Medicine Man, by Bernard Wolf, is a notable one. Not only does it not condescend about the miseries and nobility of the lives of a Navajo family, but it is about the passing on of meaningful tradition—in this case the secrets of a Peyote religion medicine man—to a younger generation taken seriously enough to be entrusted with it. Wolf's text is meaningful and simple as well as direct; his story, a true one of a six-year old boy's initiation into the Peyote rituals of his culture, is rich in detail and interest; his photographs, fully half the space of the book, are stark and magnificent as the wild Arizona landscape and people they record.

Another good sort of exception is a new Peanuts book by Charles Schulz, The "Snoopy Come Home" Movie Book. And hereby hangs a tale: my children saw my review copy of the book before they saw the movie it is from. After the movie my four-year old offered this unsolicited opinion: "The book was better." And it was. Without even venturing into the possibilities this suggests—among them the cliché that this is a post-literary generation—I can't help feeling that [End Page 219] the "Movie Book" may herald a new trend. Instead of the book-to-movie progression of the past decades, TV, ironically enough, may have made the moving picture commonplace for today's children and the moving word intriguingly new. Schultz's book is graced with the laconic humor and pointed jabs of pure feeling that already have made Peanuts a staple for adults of all ages. The book also offers some startling double-page illustrations that share, in their unconventional focus and perspective, some of the unnerving aptness of perception about small people's relationship to the full-size world that marks the works of all great writers of children's literature.

From moving pictures to moving words to Movement pictures and Movement words. Two books for children from the Feminist Press demand mention not because they are great literature—they are not—or even just because they are socially responsible—which they are. Firegirl by Gibson Rich and Nothing But a Dog by Bobbi Katz are important because of what they demonstrate about the whole problem of books for children.

While most children's books have been social propaganda of one kind or another, they have to almost precisely the same extent been undistinguished in quality. These two books from the Feminist Press suffer the same failing. Laudably lofty in consciousness, scrupulous in detail (there is a dignified representative of almost every major minority in Firegirl, for example), and commendable in intent, they just fail to prove what they assert...

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