Happy Birthday to You!

( 32 )

Overview

Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you! Since 1959, Happy Birthday to You!—Dr. Seuss’s joyous ode to individuality—has allowed readers to experience firsthand the thrill of celebrating a birthday as it is done in Katroo. Awakened by the Birthday Bird, you (the reader) are swept out of town on a Smorgasbord’s back to begin a day and night of feasting and feting in such Seussian splendor that it will take 20 days to sweep up the ...

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More About This Book

Overview

Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you! Since 1959, Happy Birthday to You!—Dr. Seuss’s joyous ode to individuality—has allowed readers to experience firsthand the thrill of celebrating a birthday as it is done in Katroo. Awakened by the Birthday Bird, you (the reader) are swept out of town on a Smorgasbord’s back to begin a day and night of feasting and feting in such Seussian splendor that it will take 20 days to sweep up the mess!

Describes a birthday celebration in Katroo presided over by the Birthday Bird.

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Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble
The magical world of Dr. Seuss springs into sight in this wondrous mini pop-up book. These six pop-ups are the best possible way to say, "Today is your birthday! Today you are you!"
From the Publisher
"The Great Birthday Bird guides us on a birthday trip. The multicolored excursion is a festive one."—School Library Journal.
Publishers Weekly
The Birthday Honk-Honker (" Wake Up! For today is your Day of all Days") and the Great Birthday Bird ("Come on! Brush your teeth and get dressed! It's your Day of all Days! It's the Best of the Best!") get the party started in Dr. Seuss's 1959 classic Happy Birthday to You!, now available in a handsize, pop-up edition. Fun paper engineering adds even more energy to Seuss's signature illustrations. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Children's Literature - Mary Hynes-Berry
Grandparents may get a real kick out of gifting their little ones with this Dr. Seuss, which dates back to the 1950s. It is likely to remind them that there is hardly a five-year-old alive who does not believe that their birthday is one of the grand events of a lifetime. The idea of Birthday Bird like the one in Katroo, who arranges an increasingly elaborate celebration, seems quite appropriate, and who could resist dreaming about a boat sized cake, cooked by "Snookers and Snookers, the official Katroo Happy Birthday cookers." As just this line shows, from the beginning, Seuss was a master of the kind of language play that develops phonemic awareness, an important pre-literacy skill. Separating out the similar but distinct sounds of "Snookers, cookers, Dutter and Butter" is vastly more engaging than the inappropriate and mind-numbing workbook pages being pushed at preschoolers. Thank goodness Random House reissues the various Dr. Seuss tales every few years, limiting their changes to a glitzier cover. Reviewer: Mary Hynes-Berry
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780394800769
  • Publisher: Random House Children's Books
  • Publication date: 5/21/1976
  • Series: Classic Seuss Series
  • Pages: 64
  • Sales rank: 76,965
  • Age range: 5 - 9 Years
  • Product dimensions: 8.31 (w) x 11.29 (h) x 0.41 (d)

Meet the Author

Dr. Seuss was born Theodor Geisel in Springfield, Massachusetts on March 2, 1904.  After attending Dartmouth College and Oxford University, he began a career in advertising.  His advertising cartoons, featuring Quick, Henry, the Flit!,  appeared in several leading American magazines.  Dr. Seuss's first children's book, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, hit the market in 1937, and the world of children's literature was changed forever!  In 1957, Seuss's The Cat in the Hat became the prototype for one of Random House's best- selling series, Beginner Books.  This popular series combined engaging stories with outrageous illustrations and playful sounds to teach basic reading skills.  Brilliant, playful, and always respectful of children, Dr. Seuss charmed his way into the consciousness of four generations of youngsters and parents.  In the process, he helped kids learn to read.  

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and three Academy Awards, Seuss was the author and illustrator of 44 children's books, some of which have been made into audiocassettes, animated television specials, and videos for children of all ages.  Even after his death in 1991, Dr. Seuss continues to be the best-selling author of children's books in the world.  

Biography

Now that generations of readers have been reared on The Cat in the Hat and Fox in Socks, it's easy to forget how colorless most children's books were before Dr. Seuss reinvented the genre. When the editorial cartoonist Theodor Seuss Geisel wrote And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street in 1936, the book was turned down by 27 publishers, many of whom said it was "too different." Geisel was about to burn his manuscript when it was rescued and published, under the pen name Dr. Seuss, by a college classmate.

Over the next two decades, Geisel concocted such delightfully loopy tales as The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins and Horton Hears a Who. Most of his books earned excellent reviews, and three received Caldecott Honor Awards. But it was the 1957 publication of The Cat in the Hat that catapulted Geisel to celebrity.

Rudolf Flesch's book Why Johnny Can't Read, along with a related Life magazine article, had recently charged that children's primers were too pallid and bland to inspire an interest in reading. The Cat in the Hat, written with 220 words from a first-grade vocabulary list, "worked like a karate chop on the weary little world of Dick, Jane and Spot," as Ellen Goodman wrote in The Detroit Free Press. With its vivid illustrations, rhyming text and topsy-turvy plot, Geisel's book for beginning readers was anything but bland. It sold nearly a million copies within three years.

Geisel was named president of Beginner Books, a new venture of Random House, where he worked with writers and artists like P.D. Eastman, Michael Frith, Al Perkins, and Roy McKie, some of whom collaborated with him on book projects. For books he wrote but didn't illustrate, Geisel used the pen name Theo LeSieg (LeSieg is Geisel spelled backwards).

As Dr. Seuss, he continued to write bestsellers. Some, like Green Eggs and Ham and the tongue-twisting Fox in Socks, were aimed at beginning readers. Others could be read by older children or read aloud by parents, who were often as captivated as their kids by Geisel's wit and imagination. Geisel's visual style appealed to television and film directors, too: The animator Chuck Jones, who had worked with Geisel on a series of Army training films, brought How the Grinch Stole Christmas! to life as a hugely popular animated TV special in 1966. A live-action movie starring Jim Carrey as the Grinch was released in 2000.

Many Dr. Seuss stories have serious undertones: The Butter Battle Book, for example, parodies the nuclear arms race. But whether he was teaching vocabulary words or values, Geisel never wrote plodding lesson books. All his stories are animated by a lively sense of visual and verbal play. At the time of his death in 1991, his books had sold more than 200 million copies. Bennett Cerf, Geisel's publisher, liked to say that of all the distinguished authors he had worked with, only one was a genius: Dr. Seuss.

Good To Know

The Cat in the Hat was written at the urging of editor William Spaulding, who insisted that a book for first-graders should have no more than 225 words. Later, Bennett Cerf bet Geisel $50 that he couldn't write a book with just 50 words. Geisel won the bet with Green Eggs and Ham, though to his recollection, Cerf never paid him the $50.

Geisel faced another challenge in 1974, when his friend Art Buchwald dared him to write a political book. Geisel picked up a copy of Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now! and a pen, crossed out each mention of the name "Marvin K. Mooney," and replaced it with "Richard M. Nixon." Buchwald reprinted the results in his syndicated column. Nine days later, President Nixon announced his resignation.

The American Heritage Dictionary says the word "nerd" first appeared in print in the Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo: "And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And bring back an It-Kutch a Preep and a Proo / A Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!" The word "grinch," after the title character in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, is defined in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary as a killjoy or spoilsport.

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    1. Also Known As:
      Theodor Seuss Geisel (full name); also: Theo LeSieg, Rosetta Stone
    1. Date of Birth:
      March 2, 1904
    2. Place of Birth:
      Springfield, Massachusetts
    1. Date of Death:
      September 4, 1991
    2. Place of Death:
      La Jolla, California

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4
( 32 )
Rating Distribution

5 Star

(18)

4 Star

(7)

3 Star

(4)

2 Star

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1 Star

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See All Sort by: Showing 1 – 20 of 32 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted April 20, 2001

    Feeling Special!

    'I wish we could do what they do in Katroo . . . .' Thus begins Dr. Seuss's amazing conception of the birthday party EACH person should have. Guided by the special brainy bird, the Birthday Honk Honker, you will find yourself in the middle of a marvelous day. You are awakened by the bird, 'Wake Up! For today is your Day of all Days!' He then heads for your bed. 'He knows your address . . .' and quickly comes to give you the special birthday handshake. This involves touching your right index finger with his equivalent digit while you touch your left big toe with your left index finger (while he mimics the same motion). Throughout, Dr. Seuss makes it clear that just being born and being you is all that is required to deserve such classy treatment. 'If you'd never been born, well what would you do? . . . be? Why, you might be a WASN'T.' Your day includes a trip through the Birthday Flower Jungle while being carried in a boat through the air by Funicular Goats. The flowers smell like licorice and cheese. For lunch, you eat hot dogs, rolled out on a spool, for an endless meal. With so much mustard on you, cleaning off in a Mustard-Off pool is required. You sing loudly, 'I am lucky!' And that's before you go to the Birthday Pal-alace with its 9,403 rooms to play games in. You get to make such a mess that it will take 20 days just to 'sweep up the mess.' Then, you meet drummers, strummers, zummers, and of course, plumbers. Dr. Derring's Singing Herrings spell out, 'Happy Birthday to You.' Then, you get the most amazing cake. And all of this because, 'There is no one alive who is you-er than you.' Now, you might wonder about the wisdom of reading this book to a child. Whatever you do cannot match up. Well, Dr. Seuss thought of that point also. As he reminds us in the end, 'So that's What the Birthday Bird Does in Katroo.' 'And I wish I could do All these great things for you!' As you can see, the book is set up to convey your deepest conviction that the honoree (usually your child) is well worth whatever the positive limits of imagination can bring. But, of course, being a mere parent, you cannot do that much. Whatever you do will naturally be received with greater enthusiasm, realizing its symbolic intent. A fun way to use this book would be to create birthday elements that build on it. For example, you could draw a birthday palace, and buy one of those games as a gift that contains hundreds of variations in it. Then, you could attach your drawing to the gift. With good imagination, your child can feel like she or he has had such a day. Carrying on with that theme, you could reenact other parts of the book. You could dress up like the Birthday Bird and give the handshake in the morning, for example. If it's a weekend, you could have hot dogs for lunch (if your honoree likes them). If it's a week day, you could have them for dinner. You get the idea. There's another message here, too. Each other person deserves this princely treatment as well. That must mean that being a person is pretty special. I know of no book that stakes out such a strong statement in favor of each person. Be sure to build on this lesson to help you child learn to respect, appreciate, and eventually care about everyone! 'And I wish I could do all these great things for you!' And I do so wish. Happy Unbirthday! Donald Mitchell, co-author of The Irresistible Growth Enterprise and The 2,000 Percent Solution

    2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted September 19, 2009

    A Wonderful Dr. Seuss Book

    This is a great addition to the Dr. Seuss collection I have at home. I Have loved Dr. Seuss since I was a kid, and this is a book I never had. There was room to write something in the front of it for my son. I got it for him on his first birthday. As all Dr. seuss books, it is imaginative and a wonderful read for adults and kids alike.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted April 19, 2013

    Content BIG, Book small

    Great celebratory book for every year of your little ones life- pop-up engagement begins as soon as you open the cover. Be aware that this is a "pocket-size" book- great for little hands but not for adding a dedication to your child or loved one.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 7, 2013

    I was considering purchasing this for my 2 year old. However, th

    I was considering purchasing this for my 2 year old. However, though listed recommendation here says 8 months+ apparently some reviewers feel differently as they tried reading to older children and they aren't as attentive. So, I may wait...because I have a little fidget myself...I mean, he's 2 after all..

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  • Posted July 12, 2012

    more from this reviewer

    Good for more than just birthdays.

    Good for more than just birthdays.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted June 7, 2012

    I am a preschool teacher. On each child's birthday I give them a

    I am a preschool teacher. On each child's birthday I give them a choice of which birthday book they want me to read to the class. Since the first time they've heard this story, no other book has been chosen. My only issue is that it's tiny. It's only maybe 6-7 inches in length and 3 inches wide. It's most certainly deserving of a full size book!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 6, 2011

    HIGHLY RECCOMEND!!!

    One of the sweetest books I've ever read!! SOOO funny!
    Definitely a keeper in our library!!
    Too bad some of the reviewers don't read the suggested ages for the book BEFORE they leave their comments. The ages are clearly stated for this book as 6- 9 NOT 4 year olds...maybe someone should read to YOU.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted March 20, 2010

    great book

    got it for my baby's 1st. b-day and I must say I loved it cuz he liked the pop up a lot.... enjoy it is worth every penny. it is small but great for his little hands.

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  • Posted December 5, 2009

    pretty keepsake, not for pre-school aged children

    This was the longest story I had ever read my 4 year old. Way too long to keep her attention. Maybe good for marking a milestone birthday as a keepsake, but not for little ones.

    0 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted August 16, 2009

    Small book was hoping it would be bigger size

    I orderd this book and was not aware it was a small book just wish it had been bigger. Thanks

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  • Anonymous

    Posted August 8, 2009

    Best book for highlighting the uniqueness of each individual

    I read this book to each of my children every year on their birthday. I have started the same with my grandchildren and I give a copy to every new baby I can. There is no better book for highlighting the uniqueness of each individual - "You are YOU". I've also been known to give a copy to a very special adult on the occasion of their birthday, in celebration of their very own "self".

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  • Posted April 20, 2009

    Dr. Sueuss Birthday pop-up book

    This was a lovely little book, perfect for a 5 year olds birthday

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  • Anonymous

    Posted June 1, 2007

    Still have the 1959 edition

    Besides a few cuts and scratches, my 1959 edition of this book is still in good condition. The imagination and creativity that Dr. Seuss put into his writing and illustrating is magnificent, especially his ability to tell a children's story using poems much like the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted October 13, 2004

    It's A great addition to a child's gift.

    I bought this book for my niece today who turns 2 today. There is not better way to celebrate a birthday than with a really good book. People add stocking stuffers i just add additional fun to my family's birthday gifts. Fantastic Journey for any child/adult of any age.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted May 17, 2004

    Outstanding

    this book is great

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 22, 2000

    I love this book!!!

    When I was a kid, my father read this book to me on my birthday. It became such a beloved tradition that he still reads this book to me every year for my birthday. It's a great book!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 28, 1999

    A wonderful way to celebrate that special day

    This book is an excellent way to not only wish a child a happy birthday but it also stresses how great it is to be an individual. To be YOU. It will teach children an excellent lesson on self esteem and help them to create their very own birthday world!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 4, 2011

    No text was provided for this review.

  • Anonymous

    Posted January 12, 2009

    No text was provided for this review.

  • Anonymous

    Posted July 30, 2009

    No text was provided for this review.

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