Slashdot Mirror
The Space Child's Mother Goose
The Scoop
In the mid-fifties, a poetry and science fiction fan teamed up with a pen illustrator to produce The Space Child's Mother Goose. Decades later, enough people still remember this book fondly that existing copies sold for up to $150 apiece. Purple House Press, a small Texas publisher, continues to reprint influential books from that era. Their reprint of this classic doggerel (in the best sense of the word) will appeal to children of the 50s through the 00s.
What's to Like?This is a clever, fun book. Instead of making up alien names, or substituting "robot" for characters in traditional nursery rhymes, the scientific concepts are integral to the poems themselves. Consider this excerpt:
Three jolly sailors from Blaydon-on-TyneFortunately, the glossary in the back has (brief) explanations of some of the weightier terms. Combined with a good encyclopedia, there's nothing here an inquisitive eight-year-old couldn't decipher.
They went to sea in a bottle by Klein.
Since the sea was entirely inside the hull
The scenery seen was exceedingly dull.
Winsor pays tribute to the classics, postulating how the king's men could have saved Humpty Dumpty with a time machine, or waxing eloquent about the theory Jack built. There's a general air of... excitement, maybe, surrounding the book. (Something else reminds me of Kit Williams' Masquerade riddle, though I can't put my finger on it.)
The illustrations nicely complement the text. The simple, anthropomorphic birdmen seem oddly familiar, like undamned Bosch characters. They're appropriately Spartan, though with plenty of important details. The gestalt evokes the feel of an old Tom Swift novel. Maybe it's the matter of fact, "let's fly to the moonbase in our rocket car" post-Sputnik optimism.
This is a fine book for children, and adults with child-like spirits. It might stir a latent interest in astronomy or mathematics. Even if it doesn't, the new and interesting words and witty rhymes are worth memorizing. This book's been due a reprint for several years.
Be sure to catch the recurring poem about a chronologically gifted black hen. It's reprinted in French, German, Greek, Swahili, and Chinese, with pictures to match.
What's to ConsiderSome kids might not like the book -- it takes a certain kind of mindset to absorb new concepts normally reserved for middle-school geometry class. It's hard to resist trying it out, though. Find an elementary school-aged friend or relative and spend an hour working through the riddles.
The SummaryHemos recommended this book as "cute." It is. It's not cute in a saccharine way. It's almost as if the author were reciting his poems to a straight-laced Nobel committee -- before turning backstage to give the rest of us a great big wink. He's hoodwinked the establishment.
You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.
I love Daniel Pinkwater's books. Great non-idiot children books (probably for kids a bit older than this book is intended for -- junior high or a bit earlier).
There's actually a quote from this book in the back of Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's "Gravitation", the standard graduate level textbook in General Relativity.
If you want wonderment and education, check out 'Little Bear', 'Bear in the Big Blue House' or 'Blue's Clues'.
All are worth a gander.
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
The idea of a children's book devoted to science and technology is deliscious. But then you can have all sorts of childrens books that can subtlely influence the mind of a child.
For example how about a child's story about a man who wanted to own all of the windows in the world?
"I do not care if I am a louse,
You cannot have a window in your house
Not round, or short, or fat, or square,
You cannot have a window, not anywhere"
;)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The review quotes up to $150 for a used copy, but that's probably for a hard cover in good condition.
My wife told the dealer she didn't care about condition, and got a dog-eared paperback copy for something like $30 or $50.
OTOH, the slashdot effect could drive prices considerably higher.
I wanted to buy the Roguelet's ABC for my kids, and was disappointed to discover that not only was it never printed as a book, but only a few letters of the alphabet were ever written.
Maybe completing the alphabet could become a collaborative literary project. SourceForge, anyone?
T:
One big monster, he called TROLL.
He don't rock, and he don't roll;
Drink no wine, and smoke no stogies.
He just Love To Eat Them Roguies.
-- The Roguelet's ABC
As a kid, I enjoyed George Gamow's "Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland". I recently introduced my 11 year old daughter to Mr. Tompkins. (So yes, to whoever it was, /.'ers *DO* have kids!).
It's a great introduction to modern physics.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Everybody should read "The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death."
The book is definitely aimed at children and not adults, but the concepts are interesting and cool enough that it's interesting geek reading too. I still occasionally find myself reciting erudite-yet-silly bits from it, and my original copy is one of my most treasured posessions.
The book is full of translations of "My Black Hen" into a zillion languages -- they're enough to make any kid think about philosophy:
Probably, Possible, my black hen.
She lays eggs in the relative when.
She doesn't lay eggs in the positive now,
Because she's unable to postulate how!
There's no guarantee that SCMG will make your kid an astrophysicist -- but it'll sure help...
if you can find it, is "A Stress Analysis Of A Strapless Evening Gown," edited by Robert A. Baker. It consisted primarily of articles from the Journal of Irreproducible Results and The Worm-Runners Digest, along with verse including some excerpts from "The Space Child's Mother Goose" (including "Three Jolly Sailors") and a poem about the neutrino from John Updike. Subjects of the essays, as I remember, include the title (interesting reading for a ten-year-old male back in the sixties), linguistic reform, logic, psychoanalyzing various of the rockets used in the early space program, and simulating the behavior of a randomly-designed computer by immersing a caged cat into a tank of water ("it exhibited an initial period of apparently random activity, but eventually settled into a quiescent state").
It's out of print but your local library may still have a copy, or you can track it down from a used bookseller.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Look man, I know you haven't yet come to terms with the fact that the entire world doesn't share your narrow opinions on what should and should not be posted on /., but lemme tell you something: there are people who read /. who have kids and very much appreciate reviews such as this one. Rushdie might be a geek, but he's not a nerd. There are *hundreds* of books released each year that are more important than Rusdhie's, and a great many of them deal with the Internet. But I'm not going to clamor for /. to review them. I subscribe to the New York Review of Books for that.
Sheesh.
Besides if you want to see it reviewed then YOU review it. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that if you do a good job it'll get posted.
Uh... I'm asking for a friend (grin)
I don't think any 9 yr old would grasp old english very well
So your nephew is a thirteen year old dog? Is that in dog years or people years?
OMG, someone besides me remembers "Fantasia Mathematica"! "Twas' Euclid and the Theorem Pi//Did plane and solid in the text//All parallel were the radii//and the angle convexed."
Thanks for mentioning the author; I think I have a date with ABE....
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-