Dont Tell the Grown Ups or Pearl Harbor

Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: The Subversive Power of Children's Literature

Author: Alison Luri

In Don't Tell the Grown-Ups, one of our wittiest and most astute cultural commentators explores the world of children's literature -- from Lewis Carroll to Dr. Seuss, from classic fairy tales to A.A. Milne, from Beatrix Potter to J.R.R. Tolkien -- and shows that many of the most enduring books for children share a surprising quality: they challenge rather than uphold respectable adult values.

Publishers Weekly

These essays cite the popularity of certain authors, including Edith Nesbit and Kate Greenaway, as proof that children prefer books that feature disobedient characters and challenge conventional adult points of view. ``As important for the critical standards she sets as for those she lauds in children's books, this book by Lurie eyes with exemplary independence a genre too often sentimentalized,'' said PW. (June)

The New York Times

Ms. Lurie writes with relish about the wicked, often subterranean honesty of folk tales....She takes the model of classic fairy tales and, good literary scholar that she is, quite convincingly applies it to such books as F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, to Jane Austen, John Updike, and Jean Stafford....The best sections of Don't Tell the Grown-Ups are the chapters about the pantheon of authors of the great Victorian and Edwardian children's books....Ms. Lurie's's examples are always illuminating.

What People Are Saying

Rosellen Brown
[A] thoroughly absorbing collection . . .by an unillusioned and cheerfully clearheaded guide. -- The New York Times Book Review

Interesting book: Objective Based Safety Training or Capitalism and Modernity

Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision

Author: Roberta Wohlstetter

It would be reassuring to believe that Pearl Harbor was just a colossal and extraordinary blunder. What is disquieting is that it was a supremely ordinary blunder. In fact, 'blunder' is too specific; our stupendous unreadiness at Pearl Harbor was neither a Sunday-morning, nor a Hawaiian, phenomenon. It was just a dramatic failure of a remarkably well-informed government to call the next enemy move in a cold-war crisis.