I love the innocent but mischievious tone of this little book. It is great fun, very imaginative. The drawings are quirky and loose (to say the least), but they add to the fun.

There's a whole series of these books by the author that are also worth tracking down.

I first came across this book in the early 80's. I found the humor to be excellent. I purchased all the books in the series, but then made the mistake of loaning them to a friend who moved out of state without ever returning them. I have tried to track him down just to get my books back, but to no avail. I have been searching for these books for the past ten+ years. I would love to once again have them in my personal library.

great follow up to Eggs wonderful funny drawings. chuckled and giggled

Who knew that the original word for "freckles" was "murfles?"
And do you know why a pretty girl was called a "bellibone?"
If you love words and their origins, this book is a gem! My copy got tossed out in a move years ago, yet I still can recall many "obsolete" words (the comical illustrations help)! Sometimes the obsolete definition makes more sense than the modern. For instance, doesn't "flutterby" make more sense than "butterfly?"

Although I have not read Mr. Moran's book, I am worried it appears as if he gives credit to George Westinghouse as fathering alternating current electricity. Westinghouse merely had the forsight to finance the brilliant mind behind AC electricity, Nikola Tesla, who conceived it, and designed the machinery for using it. Fortunately, Westinghouse was there at the right moment. It is possible without his financial help, Tesla may not have accomplished what he did. But let's make sure we have the right names for the fueding parties in this war of the currents. Westinghouse can get the credit for the AC electric plants because he was holding the purse strings, and for his courageous fight against Edison. However, it was the genius of NIKOLA TESLA that revolutionized electric power. So give credit where credit is due, and call it by its proper name--TESLA's AC electricity, not Westinghouse!

While this book may not be enough to push you over the line to rejecting the death penalty, it will certainly make you think about it. A very enticing read, the book touches upon complicated legal entanglements and medical issues without becoming too hard to understand. However, for those with little interest in criminal justice (or the mechanics of electricity), this is probably not a wise choice.

This book starts out being about criminal William Kemmler and the first case in which the electric chair was used. However, as the story progresses, it becomes more and more a tale of Thomas Edison (America's prized inventor and advocate of direct current) and his primary competitor George Westinghouse, who utalizes alternating current. Moran paints a dark picture of Edison, who will seemingly stop at nothing to slanderize Westinghouse by encouraging use of alternating currents for electrocution. This proves a major problem for Westinghouse, because in having his current branded an 'executioner's current', something dangerous to the public and only suited for providing death, he could lose valuable customers.

In this work, Moran's primary goal is to show how the invention and enactment of the electric chair as America's primary method of execution was chiefly motivated not by a desire to improve the humaneness of execution, but by corporate greed. When Edison and his lackey Harold Brown (another electrician) propetuate propaganda about alternating current as 'the best current for electrocutions due to its deadly nature', they are not looking out for the public's well being but for the good of Edison's company. And even when intentions for a better method of execution are good, as Moran points out, 'no execution can really be considered humane'.

In 1890, William Kemmler, a thirty-year-old dimwitted alcoholic, was executed at Auburn Penitentiary in New York. He had hatcheted his lover to death while she did the dishes the year before. He was a nobody, unremembered today but celebrated at the time because he was the first prisoner sentenced to die in the electric chair. Under the terms of the new New York law, the Electrical Execution Act, he got "a current of electricity, of sufficient intensity to destroy life instantaneously" rather than being hung. Kemmler's history, and the often bizarre story of how that first execution came to pass, is told in _Executioner's Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair_ (Knopf) by Richard Moran. Moran has found that the problems of adopting this novel method of execution at the time mirror our own problems over capital punishment, because of the universally felt ambivalence on the subject. Although we are all sure that our stances on the death penalty are the right ones, our society acts as if it is not at all sure, and given the recent overturning of capital cases based on DNA testing, it is surely right to be unsure.

Electrocution was advocated as a humane improvement over hanging, but it was promoted as commercial propaganda. Electricity was being wired into homes via two systems, the system of direct current advocated and sold by Thomas Edison, and the system of alternating current pushed by George Westinghouse. Edison opposed capital punishment, but realized that making Westinghouse's system the basis for execution would reinforce that it was a dangerous current, unsuitable for customers' homes. Direct current was safe, Edison maintained, but alternating current was "the current that kills." Before the word "electrocution" was coined, as there was no word for executing by electricity, Edison proposed that condemned criminals be "Westinghoused." No amount of his propaganda could have made direct current easy to transmit or easily transformed from high voltage transmission to low voltage home use, but without Edison's efforts, the push to install electric chairs would not have been nearly so strong. Most states eventually switched from hanging, despite the botched electrocutions that revolted observers. Kemmler's was one of these, requiring a couple of jolts before he had ceased breathing, but leaving him frothing at the mouth and stinking up the execution room with the smell of his burned flesh.

While there were more successful electrocutions which were quiet, quick, and scentless, no one knew at the time whether the procedure was painless (although many maintained it was), and this is still a matter of some controversy. No one really knows the details of the internal process, and no one lives to tell us if it hurt. Moran's exhaustive book traces the legal acceptance of electrocution in our country, with courts at different levels assuring all that it may have been "unusual" when it was novel, but is no longer, and it was not cruel since it seemed to be fast, at least in some cases, so it is not "cruel and unusual punishment" forbidden by the Constitution. The electric chair has continued to be used and "remains the only electrical appliance that has not undergone major modification since its invention more than one hundred years ago." When we have to apply euthanasia to our pets, we would never take them to a veterinarian for electrocution, and the system of intravenous injection seems as painless as any could be. The Gerry Commission examined the use of injectable morphine, but thought that such a painless descent into permanent sleep would unnecessarily rid execution of a needed scare factor. This fascinating book shows that of such judgments, and corporate shenanigans, was electrocution born.

it is not technical skill book. but if you have a think about adapted physical education, it would be interesting. it say that a boy with C.P. enjoy ski at first. only story, but it will move you.