Rudyard Kipling
Published: 2012-06
Total Pages: 46
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Kiplings JUST SO STORIES certainly rank in English-speaking childrens literature right along with A. A. Milnes WINNIE THE POOH and Kenneth Grahames WIND IN THE WILLOWS. They are fun to read to children 4-8, and even MORE fun for them to read for themselves at ages 7-11 (theyre marvelous vocabulary builders --the mariner of infinite resource and sagacity). My English-raised mother heard the stories when they were new and read them to me when I was a child, I read them to my own children, they read them to theirs, and I believe that same cycle has been repeated among millions of families since the stories appeared at the beginning of the 20th century. Rudyard Kipling was the first English writer to win the Nobel Prize (not the Pulitzer) for literature, in 1907. He was staunchly pro-Empire in an era in which Great Britain not only ruled the waves, but a third of the globe -- the sun never set, it was said, on the British Empire, of which he sang in hundreds of poems and short stories and novels which also deserve reading today. But imperial/colonialist notes are hard to hear in the JUST SO STORIES, which Kipling wrote for the amusement of a young niece. The stories are meant for FUN, and all children deserve to have some. Get this book; read it yourself if you havent already -- and then read it to the youngsters for whom Kipling intended it.
