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On Beyond Zebra (Dr Seuss Yellow Back Book) Review
User Submitted On Beyond Zebra (Dr Seuss Yellow Back Book) ReviewsSeptember 20, 2007 Altered perspectives for life This book introduced "paradigm shifting" into my intellectual vocabulary before I even knew what such a thing was. Many, many, many years ago (Nixon was President, I think) I read this and was changed. I can remember the the images, the textures, the smells (Ah! The ditto machine and its purple perfume!) and all my surroundings. I was sitting in the elementary school library, facing northwest toward the door. Lured by the title and the premise, I had taken the volume to my assigned seat ("Library" was a class back then, as it should have been) and quickly devoured it. The concept - that our 26-letter alphabet was an arbitrary collection and not a universal constant on a par with gravity - had never entered my cartoon-addled mind. It sparked an awareness of similar cultural and philosophical constrictions that I have expanded and retained to this day. Hats off to the Dr.! April 5, 2007 Left quite an impression... Loved this book as a child. Fast-forward thirty-some years, I am a computational linguist with a fascination for exotic writing systems. Coincidence? In think not. March 8, 2007 Best of Seuss A fun book for kids, with some deeper insight as well. "When you go beyond Zebra, Who knows...? There's no telling What wonderful things You might find yourself spelling!" October 19, 2005 A frequently overlooked Seuss gem ! This was my favorite book as a kid & still is. I now have ownership of our family's 'ancient' copy (copyright date 1955, Mom's written inscription: Christmas 1962 for my oldest brother who was age 6). I recently read it to my 6 year old son and he also was taken with this book. I am getting a new copy for him for Christmas as the original is pretty fragile now. This book belongs in every family's collection along with The Lorax, The Sneeches, Bartholomew Cubbins, Horton and the rest of the classic/original Seuss stories. October 12, 2005 Awesome...its the Dr. Actually got this for my new tat, but I love this art May 27, 2003 Mom read it to me, will read it to my nephew I was in college before I was informed that Dr. Seuss books had "messages". I then thought about it, and decided that my professor was partially right and that this is one of the books with a "message". It teaches you not to stop at the obvious but to see if there is more to life. Gloriously, the book is so good that you don't notice until you are in college and someone tells you. Which is A Good Thing. I hate books with "messages". I'm 41, and I bought this book for my just-aquirred 5 year old nephew. Only I re-read it before giving it to him. The book is a satire on those alphabet books that all children trudge through to learn their ABCs. A is for apple, and so forth, is the predictable format. Here, Dr. Seuss adjusts the format to be about animals. "A is for Ape. And B is for Bear." The story opens with Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell announcing, "I know all the twenty-six letters like that . . . ." Our narrator disagrees. "But not me." "In the places I go there are things that I see that I never could spell if I stopped with the Z." "My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends." Now, here's the problem. Although the book has many interesting and new letters and creatures, each letter is actually just a combination of the first twenty-six. For example, YUZZ is the first new letter, and is illustrated by the tall and hairy Yuzz-a-ma-Tuzz. Although a sort of symbol is established to represent the letter, Dr. Seuss doesn't use the symbol in the rhyme. He always refers to the letter as YUZZ. Dr. Seuss could have used his new letter symbol wherever it fit into the rhyme, or he could have made up letters that were not combinations of the first twenty-six letters. Either approach would have worked. I suspect that the structure in the book can either consciously or subconsciously confuse a new reader about what a letter is, what a syllable is, and what a word is. It's all quite unnecessary. If Dr. Seuss had used his new symbols to form new words, that would have been a nice basis for helping English readers learn how to move back and forth between English and languages with different methods of representation, like Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Hebrew. So, the book's a bit of a missed opportunity in this direction, too. My suggestion is that if you want to have fun with the story anyway (because the creatures are pretty swell), simply point out that Dr. Seuss made a little goof and clarify the point about what a letter is in whatever way makes the most sense to you for where your child is in reading readiness. The animals and their names are terrific, and you will enjoy them and their illustrations. Here's a partial list: Wumbus ("my high-spouting whale who lives on a hill"), Umbus ("a sort of a cow" with 98 or 99 "faucets" for giving milk), Humpf-Humpf-a-Dumpfer, Miss Fuddle-dee-Duddle (a bird with the longest tail), Glikker (blue and small, eats seeds, and juggles cinammon seeds), Nutch (lives in small caves that are in short supply), Sneedle (a mos-keedle with a sharp hum-dinger stinger on its head), Quandery (a red creature on shells in the ocean that worries a lot), Thnadner (the big one has a small shadow and the small one a big shadow), Spazzin (a camel-like creature with amazing horns for carrying baggage), Floob-Boober-Bab-Boober-Bah (fish you can use like stepping stones to get across the top of water as they bob on the surface), and Zatz-It (like a tall giraffe). The story concludes with young o'Dell getting the spirit of the narrator. "This is really great stuff! And I guess the old alphabet ISN'T enough!" o'Dell draws a new letter: " . . . what do you think that we should call this one, anyhow?" Enjoy imagination, and honor it . . . wherever it may be found! Actually, Seuss's post-"z" letters appear to constitute a syllabary rather than a true extended alphabet, but why quibble over technical details? The letters/syllabics and their accompanying creatures represent Seuss at his most delightful. And best of all, he leaves the door open for readers to create their own extension to the alphabet/syllabary! More than mere whimsy, "On Beyond Zebra" is a truly mind-expanding book. Through fantasy and humor, Seuss challenges us to open our minds to new possibilities; he encourages us to tear down artificial walls that restrict our intellectual and creative growth. This book would be as useful in teaching pedagogical theory to college students as it is for entertaining children. "On Beyond Zebra" is a triumph.
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