Sneering at phoniness would soon be a national pastime. Salinger’s existentialism for brats, serialized in The New Yorker in the 1940s, was about to arrive in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye. Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) had offered a disenchanted vision of America’s high-minded sense of itself in World War II.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée (1938) was not yet translated but its sense of stultifying despair was already fashionable. Post-war America was busy imbibing French existentialism, Austrian psychoanalysis, and Cold War dread. Seuss’s fable ran a little against the temper of his time. Well, perhaps weighty isn’t the best term. Seuss’s silly made up words, it’s definitely a book that will get kids repeating back silly animal names to you.In 1950, America’s favorite childhood fantasist, Theodor Seuss Geisel, published a weighty With plenty of rhyming, and the ever-present joy of Dr. Overall, this book is a whimsical read to share with children. That page is like a treasure hunt, letting you think back to the whole story and maybe even go on a small hunt to find the animals from the previous pages in the new zoo.Īs I mentioned before, I noticed the cage color a final time on the last page, where even though the other man is still in charge of the zoo, the cage has lit up yellow as though all suggesting that all of Gerald’s dreams are a possibility when it comes to how the zoo will be run in the future.

It gives a feeling of the whole book being interconnected, especially when we arrive towards the end of the book and see the animals all grouped together on one page. Another detail I really enjoyed about this book was that all of the illustrations were made with solely primary colors. I think one of the best parts of this book are how fun these totally made up animals are that inhabit his dream zoo. This is a little detail that I noticed later on as well. This blue, as soon as little Gerald gets to imagining, transforms into a radiant yellow. One thing to note that I couldn’t help but notice was the splash of color that was the lion cage, the blue. The book starts off with a little Gerald McGrew, who has some awfully grand ideas of how he wants to run the zoo. This is a silly book that encourages children to be imaginative when thinking about their future occupations and in crafting their dreams. Though not perhaps one of his best known, I really enjoy his book, If I Ran the Zoo. Certainly, there are many books that a great number of children have read or been read, but everyone I met has had the pleasure of experiencing at least one Dr.

When thinking about traditional children’s literature, it’s hard to think of a more consistent staple than Dr.

If i ran the zoo