I just got finished using this book for a course in Children's Literature, and it was extremely informative.

Since I am interested in children's literature (to read, and possibly to write), it was great to find out about all the different facets of literature for children, from historical children's lit, to multicultural lit, to award-winning literature.

If you are a teacher and haven't taken a course on children's literature, this book is a must-read (it even includes helps for the classroom at the end of each chapter). If you want to write for children, check this out -- it's a veritable goldmine of information to get your book noticed & published.

This book covers a wide range of genres of children's literature. It is written in an easy to read style, and covers everything a teacher or media specialist would need to begin working with children's literature. It was outstanding! The addition of the CD-ROM gives even more resources. I think it is a wonderful book.

Norton has once again done the impossible-- making her best-selling text on children's literature even better. The newest edition provides concise yet helpful summaries of the finest in children's books, and offers an updated CD-ROM tool to help teachers search and discover just right books. I heartily recommend it to all elementary teachers!

This is a fascinating and useful account of man's philosophic and religious mindsets toward the animal world, and rides the tide of the animal rights movement, with a history of same since the resurgence of activism in the sixties onward. A good companion to Singer's Animal Liberation, the book shares with it what I would consider an excessively solicitous attitude toward Darwinism, although the latter provides indirectly the characteristically openended injunction to see the continuum of man and animal brethren. In fact, how account for the evolution of this emergentist trend in history toward the post-carnivorous human? This apart, the splendid portrait in detail of the confusion over man-animal relations fills the void in one's awareness of this issue, and one senses the onset of a one-way valve here: there is no going back. The last excuses for the passage have fallen away in an age of scientific genetics and nutritional research. The man in the business devouring the flesh of animals is a morbid spectacle of an extinct 'species', goodbye to all that.

This is a fascinating book. It traces the whole history of the relationship between humans and animals and the development of the movement in recent decades to protect animals. Philosophers have led the current revival of interest in animal rights. In Europe the issue has gone further and a mass of new legislation has been passed in recent years to protect animals. If animals can suffer why should they not have rights? But why does Europe lead the US on this? Why is America being left behind? Are Americans less rational or less compassionate? Ryder addresses these issues (which are rarely addressed elsewhere). This is one of the main reasons I find the book invaluable. He also gives a wealth of scientific evidence to support the case for better treatment and respect for animals. I really think that Ryder's voice is worth listening to - after all, he gave to Peter Singer the idea of 'speciesism' and provided much of the material that Singer used in his classic Animal Liberation way back in 1975.

The author Richard Ryder is well known in animal protection circles as a successful campaigner politically and as the creator of the notion of "speciesism", a term he introduced to describe the universal oppression of the other animals by the human species. The Political Animal is his latest book and is an overview of the history of the human-nonhuman relationship, its ethics, the science of animal welfare and the political campaign.

Ryder, as a pioneer of the modern animal rights movement, is in an almost unique position in being able to write about all its aspects, European as well as American, scientific, political as well as philosophical. He is an activist in all these arenas. In the book, he describes how he stimulated the scientific study of animals, achieved direct contacts with influential politicians and revealed forgotten aspects of the history of the animal reform movement. Wearing his philosophical hat he proposes a moral code that is applicable not only in human to animal relationships, but also in human to human interactions. Briefly, he contends that we have a moral duty to relieve the pain and distress of others, regardless of their race, sex or species, with priority being given to the individual who is suffering most (i.e. the "painient"). He calls his position "painism".

This is a short, concise and insightful book on various important aspects of the subject of animal rights and protection - an issue that is likely to be far more conspicuous in the politics of the new millennium.