To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays

by Gertrude Stein

Overview

"Alphabets and names make games and everybody has a name and all the same they have in a way to have a birthday," muses Gertrude Stein in To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays. Written in 1940 and intended as a follow-up to her children's b

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300172560
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	05/31/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	1,006,431
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was at the forefront of the development of modern art and literature. Her archive is housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Giselle Potter has worked for the New Yorker and has illustrated more than twenty children's books. Timothy Young is curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke.

Editorial Reviews

Gr 8 Up—To Do was Stein's second children's book, published posthumously by Yale University in 1957. This new edition, released 65 years after her death, is accompanied by Potter's folk-art-style illustrations. The full-page artwork is charming, but the book will still find limited appeal among children. Suitable for academic or large metropolitan libraries, it is an A-to-Z compilation of birthday stories. The dense text can be challenging to follow: "And so they all went to sleep and it was F. Yes it was it was F. But nobody must forget not yet that F follows E. Francis, Fatty, Fred and Fanny." So it goes for 127 pages. Some of the stories were written with dark humor, like "Q," which features a cannibalistic rabbit. Most will leave readers scratching their heads. Certainly a work by a major American-born author is important, but To Do is best left on the shelves of research libraries.—Roxanne Burg, Orange County Public Library, CA

School Library Journal

"Gertrude Stein's long-lost kids' book is bizarre—and a great reflection of how children think. . . . As To Do proceeds through the alphabet, it becomes a book not just about language learning, but about pretending, about how children learn to distinguish the abstract from the concrete, the made-up from the real."—Stephen Burt, The Boston Globe

The Boston Globe - Stephen Burt

"The highly original, repetitive, and sparely punctuated verse may be read rapidly for heightened effect. A one-of-a-kind book that will remind grown-ups how joyful it can be to put sentences together."—Fore Word

Fore Word

Won Honorable Mention for the 2011-2012 Los Angeles Book Festival in the Photography/Art category

Los Angeles Book Festival - Honorable Mention Photography/Art