A Medley

The hacks hack drearily on, those must – be – unmarried librarians who must live behind drawn blinds in apartments that must smell of furniture polish, those mortgage- ridden fellows who surely had acne in their youths, those intense young women who’ve almost got that doctorate nailed down. The industry obstinately refuses to recognize that children are people, or at least on their way there; thus it is that the shelves in the “Children’s Books” section of your local bookstore groan still with talky-down tripe, pious moralization and word-count confections to clog the budding mind.

The Big Trends this year are to “curriculum enrichment” books wherein pallid non-children participate in great events of the past (leaving us to wonder just how it was that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. got back into the past to clue the kiddies in on the Real Meaning); and, worse, books “adapted for the disadvantaged child,” of which the sole apparent function is to keep him thoroughly disadvantaged.

CS

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C. H. Simonds

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The hacks hack drearily on, those must – be – unmarried librarians who must live behind drawn blinds in apartments that must smell of furniture polish, those mortgage- ridden fellows who surely had acne in their youths, those intense young women who’ve almost got that doctorate nailed down. The industry obstinately refuses to recognize that children are people, or at least on their way there; thus it is that the shelves in the “Children’s Books” section of your local bookstore groan still with talky-down tripe, pious moralization and word-count confections to clog the budding mind.

The Big Trends this year are to “curriculum enrichment” books wherein pallid non-children participate in great events of the past (leaving us to wonder just how it was that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. got back into the past to clue the kiddies in on the Real Meaning); and, worse, books “adapted for the disadvantaged child,” of which the sole apparent function is to keep him thoroughly disadvantaged.