Dr. Suess

It is the story about a mother bird who knows her egg will be in her nest where she left it, so she leaves him alone to go and get something for him to eat. The baby bird hatches. He doesn’t understand where his mother is so he goes to look for her. In his search, he asks a kitten, a hen, a dog, and a cow if they are his mother. They each say, “No.”

Then he sees an old car, which can’t be his mother for sure. In desperation, the hatchling calls out to a boat and a plane, and at last, convinced he has found his mother, he climbs onto the teeth of an enormous power shovel. But he is betrayed by the behemoth, as it shudders and grinds into motion. He can’t escape. “I want my mother!” he shouts.

But at this climactic moment, his fate is suddenly reversed. The shovel drops him back in his nest, just as his mother is returning home, and the two are reunited, much to their delight. He then tells her about the adventure he had looking for her.

Children will be cheered just contemplating the outrageous array of troubles they’re lucky they don’t have.

With Dr. Seuss as your guide, learning the alphabet is as easy as A, B, C.

Deliberately calculated to make its readers yawn. No one could resist those zillions of astonishing sleepyheads.

Dr. Seuss turns 50 simple words into magic in this time-honored classic. Sam-I-am won’t give up! He keeps trying to get the grumpy grown-up in the story to taste green eggs and ham. No matter how Sam-I-am presents the green eggs and ham (in a box, with a fox, in the rain, on a train), the curmudgeon refuses to try them. Finally, Sam-I-am’s pesky persistence pays off. A crowd of open-mouthed onlookers watch in suspense as the old grouch takes a bite. And?…SAY! The old sourpuss’s face is wreathed in smiles as he gratefully acknowledges, “I do so like green eggs and ham. Thank you, thank you, Sam-I-am!”

The magical world of Dr. Seuss springs into sight in this wondrous mini pop-up book. These six pop-ups are the best possible way to say, “Today is your birthday! Today you are you!”

Back in 1957, Theodor Geisel responded to an article in Life magazine that lamented the use of boring reading primers in schools. Using the pseudonym of “Dr. Seuss” (Seuss was Geisel’s middle name) and only two hundred twenty-three words, Geisel created a replacement for those dull primers: “The Cat in the Hat.” The instant success of the book prompted Geisel and his wife to found Beginner Books, and Geisel wrote many popular books in this series, including “Hop on Pop,” “Fox in Socks,” and “Green Eggs and Ham.” Other favorite titles in this series are “Go, Dog, Go!” and “Are You My Mother?” by P. D. Eastman, “A Fly Went By,” by Mike McClintock, and “Put Me in the Zoo,” by Robert Lopshire. These affordable hardcover books combine large print, easy vocabulary, and large, bright illustrations in stories kids will want to read again and again.

Poor Horton. Dr. Seuss’s kindly elephant is persuaded to sit on an egg while its mother, the good-for-nothing bird lazy Maysie, takes a break. Little does Horton know that Maysie is setting off for a permanent vacation in Palm Springs. He waits, and waits, never leaving his precarious branch, even through a freezing winter and a spring that’s punctuated by the insults of his friends. (”They taunted. They teased him. They yelled ‘How Absurd! Old Horton the Elephant thinks he’s a bird!’”) Further indignities await, but Horton has the patience of Job–from whose story this one clearly derives–and he is rewarded in the end by the surprise birth of… an elephant-bird. Horton Hatches the Egg contains some of Theodor Geisel’s most inspired verse and some of his best-ever illustrations, the dated style of which only accentuates their power and charm. A book no childhood should be without. — Richard Farr