The Philadelphia Inquirer absolutely insists on printing editorials that try to be cute but are totally tedious (witness unfunny conservative comedian Andy Borowitz here speculating last week about the Iraqis wondering why we didn’t do more to recognize the four-year anniversary of the war; hey, we wrecked your country and created a vacuum to be filled by insurgents and sectarian hatred, thus engulfing it in a civil war…isn’t that enough?).The paper did so again today, with writer Peter Mandel criticizing “The Cat In The Hat” by Dr. Seuss, the occasion being that 2007 marks the book’s 50th anniversary.
The editorial notes two children’s books Mandel has written, “Planes At The Airport” as well as a book about Willie Mays, so I guess it’s safe to assume that he’s a subject matter expert.
I realize the column is meant to be tongue in cheek, and though Mandel has a point about how everything depicted in the book is sooo 1950s and thus sooo thoroughly unhip now, I just want to point out that “The Cat In The Hat” is a great book for a beginning reader (and I think kids get past the fact more often than not that the book is stuck in a time warp). The repetition of the monosyllabic words with relatively uncomplicated vowel and consonant pairings was extremely helpful to the young one, helping him to gradually work his way up to more complicated material.
So don’t trash on Seuss, I say you should not; I think Mandel’s time as a child, he forgot…
(Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
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