In the classic tradition of A.A. Milne, this compilationcaptures all the enchanment of the Hundred Acre Wood. The selectedquotes are endearing and will send any reader back to their days of childhood. An excellent gift for the Pooh lover in your family.

"The Tao of Pooh" has been called "the book most often recommended to explain Taoist principles." Hoff's fame offered a bully pulpit, and after a decade he made use of it. He wrote a companion book, "The Te of Piglet," about the way of the small, weak, childlike, feminine, sensitive, virtuous, modest, yielding, and fluid. At least, I think that's what it's about. There's little in here about either Piglet or Te (pronounced DEHr or DUHr). Instead, it's a diatribe against heavy industry, business, government (especially the Forest Service), pesticides, doctors, the military, feminists, conservatives, realists, Western culture, mainstream Americans, critics, and all the other "Eeyores" of the world. Yes, Hoff criticises critics (and shows himself to be an Eeyore). Very disappointing.

The dialog with Piglet and the others is there, though with a depressing and negative spin. (Inexplicably, Piglet has hired a thief as a bodyguard. And Eeyore isn't just gloomy, he's a mean SOB.) The original Pooh stories are there, though crudely intercut in very large chunks. The original Pooh illustrations are there. The funky capitalization is there. Quotations from Taoist philosophers are there in abundance. In fact, it's a rather long book -- almost twice as long as the first one. There are long explanatory sections about the history of Taoism and Confucianism, and smatterings of Taoist principles. The book just doesn't lift one's spirits. Instead of selling Taoism, it's an environmentalist rant. Hoff even claims that our generation will see the collapse of business/civilization as we know it, to be replaced by a new age of environmental consciousness.

Not that there aren't useful insights here, of course. One of my favorites: "A successful individual appears to succeed because he is Aggressive -- he chases after things and gets them. Chances are his positive attitude attracts those things to him and creates opportunities for success to happen. But chances are onlookers see Aggression succeeding, rather than Attitude. So that's what they imitate. And, since aggression attracts more aggression, the want-to-be-successful turn business into Busyness, creating an atmosphere of increasing combativeness and negativity in which relatively few are likely to be successful -- and even fewer are likely to be happy." Hoff recommends instead that we follow the way of Gandhi, "the greatest Piglet of all time."

Taoists have historically been critics of hierarchical, rule-based Confucian governments and practices, and they have always supported the underdog. But Taoists have also been scientists, artists, philosophers, healers, and intellectuals of all sorts. I'd rather read about their positive beliefs than about the negatives of everyone else. And I'd like to see it done with more humor. To quote Hoff, "Eeyores, in other words, are Whiners. They believe the negative but not the positive and are so obsessed with What's Wrong that the Good Things in Life pass them by unnoticed. Are they the ones, then, to give us an accurate account of what life is about? If the universe were governed by the Eeyore Attitude, the whole thing would have collapsed eons ago."

You wouldn't think the same author wrote these two books.

... approach it carefully.

One reviewer gave an excellent reason to enjoy this book: he was feeling very down and small and put upon, and Hoff's rants helped to give him an ally and make him feel not quite so insignificant. If you would like to own this companion to "The Tao of Pooh," I suggest that you purchase it when you're in such a mood, or better yet, check it out from the library.

As other reviewers of written, there's much more ranting than philosophy in this book. In "Tao of Pooh," I felt like I was being taught Taoist philosophy from a new perspective. That's what I naturally thought that I was getting into with the "Te of Piglet." Nope. Hoff flirts with the idea briefly, but instead uses Piglet as a soap box to attack the Eyores of the world. Interestingly enough, he eventually seems to realize what he's doing, and so does Piglet (who he spends more time having fictional conversations with than he does quoting the dear character). And Piglet eventually takes him to task for it.

I think that Hoff was desperate. Could he simply not find enough examples in the Pooh stories of Piglet's smallness being used for the betterment of the Wood? I discussed this book with some frieds, and mentioned how the author seemed to be really reaching in his villification of Eyore: in his fictional conversations, he has Eyore coming in to pester and depress everyone. What my friends reminded me of is that, in the original Pooh stories, the characters GO TO EYORE the majority of the time when there's need for tension between the characters, for a less than optomistic view of the world, and even for someone to rescue. Eyore is needed and loved *because* he is gloomy, not in spite of it.

And at the end, Piglet - small little Piglet who Hoff has misused in an effort to have his hissy fit (and, I presume, make his next car payment) - comes to Eyore's defense. And, for once, however briefly, Hoff is blessedly speechless.

The Te of Piglet,
Taoism as Described Through the Famous Lovable Character of Piglet

The Te of Piglet, written by Benjamin Hoff, is not your ordinary run of the mill novel. While most novels have a plot and a conflict, The Te of Piglet is educational in nature. The Te of Piglet continues to teach Taoism, an ancient Chinese philosophy, much like the book's predecessors, The Tao of Pooh.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I am a person who gets bored while reading straight information; I need the knowledge to be presented in an interesting and fascinating way. That is why I love The Te of Piglet. I can't think of a better way to talk about philosophy than through familiar lovable characters that we know from our childhood. I thoroughly enjoyed the way Hoff combined interaction with the characters, ancient stories, other philosophers and his own ideas. This allowed for the teachings of the beliefs of Taoism in a way that is easy to understand and interesting to read. I would highly suggest this book to anyone who either enjoys different, ancient philosophy or simply is a fan of Winnie the Pooh. This was a great read!

I grew up listening to and loving the two poetry Winnie the Pooh books. If like me, you love this poetry, DO NOT purchase these tapes! After listening to the first 15 minutes of one tape and skimming other poems in the hopes that Kuralt suddenly gained inspiration, the tapes have remained in the box unlistened to. I have tried to give them to other teachers, only to have them returned to me. Charles Kuralt is absolutely the WRONG person to read this wonderful poetry. His dry, boring, monotonous voice made me want to cry, terrified that his reading would turn kids off to Milne's incredibly beautiful and funny poetry.

I spent my childhood and adolescence in sight of Ashdown Forest, England, where the Pooh books are set. I still retain a deep affection for them. But Milne's verse is something else and would long-ago have been forgotten but for the stories with which it is associated. Nobody who has seen the parody:

Hush, Hush. Nobody cares. Christopher Robin has fallen down stairs.

will ever again be able to read Milne's sentimental whimsies with a straight face. The book is only worth three stars for the beautiful illustrations by E H Shepard

Everyone who has read Milne's original Pooh books knows that he can write a good hum, after all Pooh gives us several.

In this volume (and the earlier "When We Were Very Young") Milne's voice comes through more clearly, unmoderated by writing for his bear of little brain. He gives us a small volume full of poems that should surely last as well as his prose. While some of them are strongly flavoured by the time and place where he wrote them others are more universal in their subject and tone.

As you read this volume you will almost certainly come across something you recognise, if it isn't the line "James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree" that catches your memory then it might be "Just a bit of butter for the royal slice of bread." If not, then you will find many of them sticking when you have read them to a child.

I have seen editions of this volume without the illustrations by E.H. Shepard, it would seem to me a travesty to separate the two. Shepard has always been the traditional illustrator of Milne and the pen and ink drawings he made for the first edition of this book, retained in this (and most) paperback edition are marvellous - well executed and suiting the style and subject of the poems.

It is hard to overstate the joy my daughter and I have had from this volume. My mother read many of these poems to me thirty five (and more) years ago, over the past few years my daughter and I have discovered our own favourites. Now she is old enough that she reads them herself.

The poems are indeed a little sentimental, a little whimsical and seem to come from a softer, more pastoral childhood than has perhaps existed for many years. I don't see this as a problem for the poetry, after all, if we cannot recreate a gentler time for our children perhaps we can soften the one we can provide with the tiny charming tales in these poems.

I would recommend this book to anyone with a small child. I give it only four stars as the poems are mixed in quality.

The Red House Mystery by A.A Milne was a mystery set in the late 1900's. The story was about a lady named Miss Stevens in the red house. There is a man or a woman that is killing people, so the public has to try and figure out who did it, when and how. This is probably one of the best mystery stories I have ever read. This book really had a lot of suspense and surprising points. I think you'll be very shocked about what happens at the end. I recommend this book to whoever likes mysteries or who is at a high school level.

"I envy those readers who are coming to this lighthearted masterpiece for the first time," writes Douglas G. Greene in the introduction of A. A. Milne's "The Red House Mystery." Since Greene is considered the leading expert on John Dickson Carr--one of the greatest Golden Age detective novelists--I was tremendously excited by his recommendation and plunged into the book straightaway.

It took me a little under two weeks to finish. Yes, for a book that isn't even two hundred pages. The story features Antony Gillingham and Bill Beverley as a rather unlikely Holmes and Watson who set out to unravel a bizarre murder at the Red House. Although Gillingham and Beverley make an interesting pair, the way they tackle the problem is a bit too languid and leisurely for my taste (and I usually thrive on cozy mysteries), and since there is virtually no action and almost no other major characters to focus on--well, it's not exactly a page-turner. There are a few nifty plot tricks--one twist involving a door key is particularly clever--but the resolution (which falls back on that most irritating of cliches, the letter of confession) doesn't carry much in the way of suspense or surprise.

Still, it's all very witty and well-written, and the droll humor that spawned "Winnie-the-Pooh" is very much in evidence. Anglophiles will treasure it for its delineation of mid-1920s England alone. But I was expecting a masterpiece, and as a detective novel, "The Red House Mystery" is no masterpiece--but then again, Mr. Milne is no John Dickson Carr.

This was the most fun I've had reading a mystery since I read the Hardy Boys as a kid. It seems you should be reading it under the covers with a flashlight. In The Red House Mystery, A.A. Milne (of Pooh fame) lets us pal around with Tony Gillingham, a jack-of-all-trades who is trying his hand a being a detective. The setting is an English country house loaded with guests, including the British major, the willful actress, and the dim-but-lovable young athlete. These are stock characters; Tony and his friend Bill even gleefully refer to each other as "Holmes" and "Watson". It's all very playful, despite the corpse. So much so that Tony and Bill are guilty about how much fun they are having.

There are tons of mentions of amateur theatricals and acting. Tony is playing at being a detective and so is the reader, which draws you into the story alongside him. In a way you are competing with Tony and Bill to solve the crime. It's a fair contest: only amateurs allowed. Milne gives you all the clues, even to the point of saying things like "This would be important later." In the reader's head a siren goes off and a sign lights up saying "CLUE". Tony and Bill bounce theories off each other and the theories change as the clues mount up. Still, Tony is always ahead of Bill (and probably the reader). He knows the real question in a mystery is not "How?" but "Why?"

The best parts are the gasps of surprise and moments of anticipation while we wait in darkness for the sounds of approaching footsteps. Milne has a great way of setting the mood, whether it's nervous tension or eager curiosity. A fun mystery is like opening up a big present: You can't wait to know what it is. Milne conveys this sense of "I need to know" in this his one-and-only mystery novel. If you're like me, you'll need to know and keep saying to yourself, "One more chapter and I'll put out the light."

This was a tough book to read. My father, aunt, and I are all avis readers and fans of Milne and all things Pooh. But this book was very dry and agonizingly slow. Interesting in bits and pieces, but none of us could finish the book. In my family that is a rarity for any book. It is really about the life of the son of the original author of the Pooh books. You do get a usual sense of the frustration of those who have famous parents here. The bset thing about the book was the 6 picutres in the book. THey feature the original pooh toys, the real pooh sticks bridge, and the real hollow tree in England that A.A. Milne used in his stories. I was really looking forward to more.

I thought I'd enjoy this one, but I ended up regretting that I'd bought this edition of all three of Christopher Milne's memoirs, and not just the first book on its own. Obviously it would have been impossible to fit all three books into one volume, so the original books have been drastically abridged. But this has resulted in a rushed precis of Milne's life, rather than an enjoyable autobiography.

The first book was interesting; so much so that I was quite annoyed that so much of it had been edited out. Obviously, the first book, in which Milne tells us what it was like to be the real Christopher Robin, was always going to be the most appealing; everyone wants to know about where Pooh really came from and what he and C.R. really got up to in the Hundred Acre Wood.

But as "Beyond the world of Pooh" progressed it got more and more aimless and uninteresting. Once Milne has told us (in barely more than a few paragraphs in this edition) of his wartime exploits, and then how he went on to open his bookshop, there's not much more to tell. He appears to promise to tell us about his relationship with his handicapped daughter, but never delivers; a missed opportunity to bring some life into the story. Nothing much happens, and the book stagnates.

Of course, it was Milne's right, after a lifetime of being branded with the "Christopher Robin is saying his prayers" image of him created by the media, to retire to a quiet and uneventful life.

But did he have to write a book about it?

I'm going to give this one four stars sight-unseen. I have all three of the original volumes, and think they would be splendid combined into a single volume. One could wish the parts left out would be more from the last two volumes, as admittedly more people would be interested in the background of the Pooh Books as such than in Christopher Milne's own life. Since I know this likely is not the case, I will give this volume four stars. Had all three of the original volumes been combined without editing, I would have given it five stars.

You see, not everyone is concerned merely with either the Pooh Books or the boy who inspired the character Christopher Robin. I should know. Christopher Robin was not merely a character I enjoyed; he was my childhood alter ego, to a degree many of my readers may find hard to imagine. And yet, I knew there was a real boy behind the story, that he and I were much alike on many fundamental levels, and that I would be much interested in learning more about him. When I bought Christopher Milne's original volumes, I was happily flabbergasted to see how dead-on my intuition about him had been. Both as children and as adults, we indeed had much in common, and quite likely would have been good friends had we grown up in the same time and place.

I am far from being the pantheistic humanist that Christopher Milne became, or that A.A. Milne was before him. He says, candidly, that he never met the Christian God he heard about in church. But had I not become a Christian, I too would have become a pantheistic humanist, and for very similar reasons. I can sympathize with his viewpoint, even if I believe I can refute it. All in all, I found the original trilogy enjoyable and even challenging reading, and I'm sure I'd find the "condensed version" so as well. (Now if only someone could show me Lesley Milne's introduction to this volume...)