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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The bare necessities (ho ho!), Feb 22 2004
For those cave dwellers amongst you who've finally crept out of your hermit-like existences to gain a little knowledge about the wide world of children's picture books, the name "Eric Carle" will be unknown to you. For everyone else in the universe, however, Mr. Carle is undoubtedly one of the best known illustrators of the Western world. The father of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" and the more recent "Slowly Slowly Slowly Said the Sloth", his earlier work, "Brown Bear", is a sweet simple storyline that remains timeless.In this story, different animal characters, cut cleverly from a dazzling array of colored papers, tell the viewer what it is that they see. The cat sees a dog, the dog sees a sheep, the sheep sees a goldfish, etc. Now when I said this story was timeless, I wasn't kidding. Honestly, I'm having a great deal of difficulty finding ANYTHING about this story that's going to date it in one or two hundred years down the road. Originally published in 1967, the book is particularly impressive because of the shot of children it cuts to towards the end. Suddenly the viewer is observing kids of a myriad of races and skin tones. In 1967. And these are not your white-kids-painted-brown type pictures either. And they're not all just black or white! There's the most surprising thing of all, to my mind. In an age when illustrators were having a devil of a time remembering to even include black kids in the occasional book, here we have a book that is including everything from Asian to Native American children, front and center. On a completely unrelated side-note, the mother in this book bears a striking resemblance to a LOT of very hip mommies these days. From her dark rimmed Harry Potteresque glasses to her well coiffed hair, this is a mother on the go. To be perfectly blunt, I'm not an Eric Carle fan. He bores me, and I have distinct memories of finding "The Hungry Caterpillar" annoying as a child. But at the same time I'm having a lot of difficulty finding anything at all wrong with this book. It's not the most exciting picture book on the market today. It will not grab you, necessarily. It doesn't demand the spotlight or find itself in intellectual discussions about the nature of animal representation for the pre-adolescent set. It's just a good book with a nice plot and pretty pictures that teach kids about colors and animals. And doggone it, that's good enough for me.
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by Eric Carle
by Brown
by Bill Martin
by Sandra Boynton
by Christopher Santoro
