Lily Tomlin Books

We purchased this book for a gift to our preschool teachers. They really enjoyed it.

This is a very thoughtful book that includes the wit and wisdom of Mr. Rogers, in an easy-to-read format that is both interesting and educational. I can't imagine anyone who doesn't know who Mr. Rogers is. Like virtually all American Children of the '80s & '90s I grew up watching Mr. Rogers. Of course I didn't know it then, but looking back, Mr. Rogers was a very unique person. Mr. Rogers was perhaps the only man in modern pop-culture who was able to speak to kids in such an honest and intelligent way. Mr. Rogers taught me the importance of compassion and the importance of never taking anyone (or anything) for granted. I recommend this book to anyone with a heart and a mind.

A nice little book full of simple, innocuous sayings displaying a keen grasp of the obvious. But by and large, I didn't find anything that really grabbed me, anything that made me think "Wow!" I did find one or two exceptions to this. Rogers writes:

"Sometimes, though, I wonder if we confuse strength with other words - like aggression, and even violence."

I wonder what Mister Rogers would have made of politicians defining "strength" as "support for war."

this ought to be a required textbook in all the schools and colleges in the world.it is that good without a doubt.

Great book to have on the coffee table. Just a quick read with great thoughts.

The word "Tour de Force" may not have been invented with Lily Tomlin specifically in mind, but she is one of the best people for whom this epithet should be used. I've seen her do this show live, twice, when it first came to Philadelphia, and enjoy repeating the experience via the video, and the book. She's an amazing performer, and this is an amazing piece of theater.

This play is just what my title says....very entertaining and if you are in the theatre world, guys, but especially girls, should look into a purchase of this play for potential monologues for auditions.

I'm in an arts/high school program, PCCA. I came in after all of the other students had already been there for over a year. This was the first piece I ever performed there. I did a section of it where Trudy is Trudy, in the beginning.

The character was so rich. So many different quirks. The audience loved it, so did the other performers who did the same piece. This is one funny script.

I wasn't nervous when i performed it at all. I just kept thinking how funny the script was, and that, not matter how terrible the acting, the audience would still enjoy the performing.

This one woman plays many characters, and will take you on a journey of laughter, and much more, and leave you smiling for long after you put it down...

Trudy the Bag Lady has made a life for herself on the streets, offering her own bits of wit and wisdom to the passers-by. Before she wound up on the streets, she was in and out of hospitals, receiving so much electro-shock therapy that she believes her nervous system has been re-wired and now tunes into the bio-rhythms of people around her.

Trudy takes us, along with her two alien companions, on a discovery trip to find out what it means to be human and imparting her own impressions on life. She tunes in a wide array of people, ranging from Agnus Angst, a 15-year-old punk performance artist; Agnus' grandparents Lud and Marie; Chrissy, a recently unemployed workout enthusiast; Lily, an actress currently performing a one-woman show; and many others, both men and women, gay and straight.

This play is full of marvelous insight into the human condition and life in the 1980's. This is very apparent in the incredible second act, in which we follow Lyn from the consciousness-raising times of the 1970's through her rise and fall in the business ranks of the 1980's and her turbulent family life. Also, all the characters, in one form or another, have some influence on the life of the other characters in the play, whether or not they actually meet: Lyn has an affair with Agnus's mother; Kate, a rich trendsetter, finds a suicide note left by Chrissy lying in the street; Trudy takes the aliens to see Lily's play in order to show them goosebumps.

The book also includes still images, from the stage production, of Lily Tomlin, many of which were shot by Annie Leibowitz. Jane Wagner also created some montages of Lily as the many characters in the play.

Full of wit, insight and tenderness, this play stands as a perfect glimpse into understanding society.

I adore this book! Edith Ann is so insightful, funny and charming. This book will truly brighten up your day and make you laugh. An absolute MUST for Lily Tomlin fans!!!

This book tells stories through the eyes of a child that are more of parables to adults that take life WAY too seriously. I've read this book several times, and each time it brings back a piece of my childhood that I shouldn't forget, and it teaches me things about life that I should always remember. Edith Ann's life thus far should be an example to our lives as we continue to complicate things and remain over-stressed...Read it!

As you read the pithy observations of Edith Ann, you have to imagine Lily Tomlin perched in the oversized rocking chair. I can hear her voice as Edith Ann says, "My mom says I have to be more positive and I say life has to be more positive too or it's just not going to work."
You can't help but smile (and sometimes laugh out loud) as you read Edith Ann's comments about being a kid. Sometimes she gives her opinions on grown up issues too. Fun...Fun...Fun
The book is 191 pages, but is a quick read with little sketches and plenty of white space. "Growing up can take a lifetime," according to Edith Ann.

Edith Ann is charming. With the simplicity of a child, she faces fears that we all deal with. When I feel that I am losing any part of my childhood, I reach for this book. You should too.

There are few books, paper or audio, that I find inspirational to the point I share it with everyone in my "neighborhood". This audio book was very moving for me, so much so that I have purchased it as a gift for many and will share it as a gift for others during this Holiday season. Mr. Rogers was one of the regular shows I grew up with as a child, but more importantly, his thoughts about life should be with all of us as adults, in the global neighborhood. My ten year old daughter listens to the CD to help her go to sleep at night, and my 13 year old son sneaks a listen between rock and jazz. While they did not have the opportunity to experience Mr. Rogers as I did as a child, they have been touched by him at a very important part of their lives. Once you listen to this CD, you may not want to put on a red sweater and white sneakers, but you will want to share it with your neighborhood. This is a very touching CD enjoyable by all. -- Suzann Brucato

Mister Rogers was a regular part of my life as a child. I remember sitting in front of the TV everyday. Singing his "It's such a good feeling..." song along with him. His gentle nature and optimistic look on life rubbed off on me.

Today, as I travel the country presenting workshops and seminars on the power of being positively passionate and defeating the ill effects of negativity, I think Mr. Rogers' words echo within.

This book captures the essence of Mr. Rogers' work. Read it and reflect on his simple truths and powerful philosophies. I've already purchased several copies of this book as gifts to others.

Mr. Rogers lives in every person who searches for the good in things and strives to make the world a better place!

I read this book many time to my daughter, since her age of three-four, she still enjoy it much. It is a beautiful, funny, and well written story. It is my definitely one of my favorite. It teaches you that what the world is after all it is what we think it is. What a lesson for the half-empty fellows! It is written in a crescendo on this theme until the end: the eye blinking moon. Beautiful.

The princess wanted the moon. Her father, the king, demanded it be gotten for her. As you can imagine, this causes problems for the king's servants. The Royal Wizard, Mathematician and the Lord High Chamberlain have done many near-impossible feats for the king--but getting the moon? It's out of the question! But the Royal Court Jester thinks not. (Is this another one of his jokes?) A funny story.

A Non-Workbook, Non-Textbook Approach to Teaching Language Arts: Grades 4 Through 8 and Up

Was suprised to only see 18 reviews on this book. My daughter (aged 7) loves this book and has asked me to read it over many times!! I enjoy reading it as much as she enjoys hearing it.

Illustrations are sketched and mostly pastel colors are utiilized. After reading each detailed page, the pictures don't seem to do much for the imagination. Good ideas are behind the words, but this book is extremely wordy at times and could've been shortened while still making the same point known. I enjoyed how the King, who was in search for the moon for his sick daughter, continued to ask his smartest men to figure out a way to get his daughter the moon only to find out that the court jester was the wittiest of them all. The daughter helps solve her own problem without realizing it and comes to a wonderful conclusion about how she can have the moon in her hand and also see it in the sky.

Despite Rosemary Thurber's reassurances in the introduction to the reillustrated edition that a "new artist's point of view could be exciting," this new version is very disappointing. Louis Slobodkin's weird and wiggly drawings tinged in red and aqua have been replaced by Simont's conventional watercolor illustrations. While they are attractive, they are not, as Booklist describes them, a "bright, refreshing interpretation." Simont duplicates many of the scenes from the original, such as the doctor and king at the bedside of the princess or the princess skipping rope in the garden-though the text does not mention a jump rope. In the original, as the Lord High Chamberlain lists all the things he has gotten for the King, Slobodkin has the items frame the page as the Chamberlain unrolls a scroll in his hand; Simont does the same thing. When the Chamberlain says that the moon is bigger than the Princess's room, Slobodkin places the room inside the moon; Simont does the same thing. A scene-by-scene comparison reveals that Simont simply updates most of the original drawings. The two-page layout of the Princess holding her thumbnail up against the moon viewed through an arched window is an exact duplicate of the 1943 edition. Even the text on the two pages differs by only two sentences. I just do not accept the validity of this so-called "new" interpretation. Simont's literal and conventional depictions of the characters and setting actually move the story to a more ordinary level, while Slobodkin's strange squiggles keep the story in the realm of the imagination and give the tale a dream-like quality. Stick with the original.

This book was required reading by a professor. His superior intellect decided this was a good book so I am compelled to agree... even if I didn't read it.

By now, several historians have looked at the experiences in the massive migrations of Negroes from the American South to its northern cities from 1900 to the post World War 2 era. But of course, many poor southern whites also voted with their feet and moved north. The unifying theme Gregory has chosen is to look at both migrations. And to compare and contrast the experiences of both groups.

For studying whites, he goes beyond looking at the so-called hillbilly ghettos that sprang up in various northern cities. In the popular (white northern) imagination of the times, these were considered well nigh akin to the often neighbouring black ghettos. Gregory points out that most southern whites had quite different experiences, though they were still invariably stereotyped by white northerners.

We see examples of blacks and whites struggling to improve themselves. Often politically. While there were indeed many common facets, what persistently emerges is that blacks had to work harder to overcome obstacles.

This was required reading for a graduate course in American history.

In his book The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America, author James N. Gregory proceeds thematically, rather than chronologically. His intent is to use a stereoscopic method (stereoscopes set two similar but different images next to each other, thus tricking the eyes and the brain into fusing the images in a way that makes them three dimensional) in order to achieve a third dimension (page 8): not only to examine the great internal movements of black and white peoples from the American South to the American North and West, but also to examine the social, cultural, economic, and political impact that this massive internal movement of peoples had on the history of America during the twentieth century.

Gregory's The Southern Diaspora is divided into nine chapters: Chapter 1, "A Century of Migration," is an overview of the of the migration cycles and the changing economics and demography of these migrations over the course of the twentieth century, concluding that the Southern Diaspora was numerically larger than previous scholars have understood; Chapter 2, "Migration Stories," surveys the public meanings of the two sets of exoduses and highlights the unique role that media institutions and social scientists played in shaping the expectations and interactions of southerners on the move; Chapter 3, "Success and Failure," answers questions about the economic experience of black and white southerners, dismantling the maladjustment paradigm that had been so prominent in previous scholarship while also showing the critical differences in the opportunity structure facing black and white southern migrants; Chapter 4,
"The Black Metropolis," examines the communities that African Americans built in the major cities, resurrecting the label "Black Metropolis" and mapping the new and powerful cultural apparatus of those communities; Chapter 5, "Uptown and Beyond," examines the very different community formations of white southerners who spread out through suburbs and rural areas as well as big cities, struggled with confusing issues of social identity, and developed cultural institutions of historical import (e.g., diaspora country music and the white diaspora literary community would help to reshape understandings of both region and race); Chapter 6. "Gospel Highways," explores the diaspora's impact on American religion as both racial groups built Baptist and Pentecostal churches and helped to revitalize and spread evangelical Protestantism, with important political as well as religious implications for America; Chapter 7, "Leveraging Civil Rights," develops the issue of black political influence, demonstrating how important geography was to the initial phases of what ultimately became the civil rights movement;
Chapter 8, "Re-figuring Conservatism," brings the white migrants into the story of race, class, and regional transformations, exploring contributions to white working class conservatism on the one hand, and to new formulations of white liberalism on the other. Chapter 9, "Great
Migrations," brings te diaspora to a close in the 1970s and 1980s, and summarized some of Gregory's major findings (pages 8 and 9).

One important point made by Gregory is that for as long as there was something called the American South, southerners in significant numbers had been leaving; the South itself expanded through migration as white southerners in the early 1800s carved out new states for cotton and
slavery, while others moved to places north and west that today are understood to be regionally separate from the South. White out-migration was especially heavy in the two decades after the Civil War, with many leaving for farming opportunities and others settling in the North's big
cities-New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago-where the nation's commerce was concentrated. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were more than 1 million southern-born whites living outside their birth region. Census takers also counted more than 335,000 southern born African Americans living in the North and West in 1900 (page 12).

African Americans had left the South in the nineteenth century for different reasons and in different directions. Before the Civil War, some had been taken west by slaveholders who dared to move their human property into places like California and Kansas; others had escaped
northward, typically to Ohio, upstate New York, Massachusetts, and Canada. There was also something of an exodus of free black people from the South after 1830, with many of them settling in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. Emancipation increased out-migration among black southerners, much of it directed toward northern cities (New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago were key destinations for freed people from Virginia and Maryland after the Civil War), but rural destinations were also and equally important: black southern migration, frequently organized by "colonization" or "emigration" societies, moved north into Indiana and west into Kansas from Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee in the 1870s and 1880s (pages 12 and 13).

The central thesis of Gregory's Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America, is threefold. First, the size of the black and white southern diaspora was much more substantial than previously reported: over the course of the
twentieth century, close to 8 million black southerners, nearly 20 million white southerners, and more than 1 million southern-born Latinos participated in the diaspora (page 14). Second, the twentieth century southern diaspora can be divided into two periods: the first phase of migration . starts during the initial decade of the century, grows in the second decade when at least 1.3 million southerners leave home, reaches a peak in the 1920s with 2 million new black and white southern migrants, then tapers off in the 1930s; a much bigger second wave begins with World
War II when more than 4 million southerners move north or west, grows even larger in the 1950s when at least 4.3 million leave the South, remains near that level through the 1960s and 1970s, and then declines in the 1980s and 1990s (pages 14 and 15). Third, white southern out-migrants
outnumbered black southern out-migrants during every decade of the twentieth century, and usually by a large margin. But the southern black exodus had the more important impact: blacks were leaving the South at much higher rates than whites, and many were going to geographic
regions that had known little racial diversity (pages 15 and 17). The largest number of black migrants lived in the Great Lakes states (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin); they were also the key destination for white southerners. The Middle Atlantic states (New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey) were second as a destination for African Americans, but-with the exception of New York City-much less popular with whites. The Pacific states was the third important area of settlement for both groups, especially California: by 1970, more than 1.6
million white and 571,000 black southerners lived in that state. California was also the chief destination for Tejanos and other southern-born Latinos, 213,000 of whom had settled there by 1970; Hispanic southerners had also migrated to Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana (pages 18 and 19).

Gregory challenges the image that southern migrants in the north and west were merely helpless and poor. While they faced many cultural, social, and economic challenges from within and without their culture, these migrants also had a substantial support system of family relations, organizations, and institutions that enabled them not just to survive, but even to thrive and succeed in differing environments despite tremendous odds. Financially, the majority of southern migrants did much better than their contemporaries who chose to remain in the South.

Whites and blacks left the South for related but somewhat different reasons, and found very different opportunities in the North and West. Those differences turned on the central issue of race, and from that flowed other significant differences derived from geography, class dynamics, and community formation patterns. Racial privilege granted southern white migrants significant economic and spatial advantages (i.e., the choice of where, how, and with whom they settled) over their black counterparts; that advantage was used to choose the best housing they could afford in the least dense neighborhoods, often in outlying, rather than central, urban areas. The fact that black and white southerners settled in different sorts of places, in different
concentrations would have implications not just on southern individual and group experiences, but on the North, the West, and the nation as a whole. Despite the fact that white migrants had greater numbers, black migrants gained capacities to influence cultural and political institutions that would ultimately dictate profound historical changes; The fact that whites chose dispersion over concentration, and opted for places that initially would not be centers of political and cultural power, worked against the construction of physically defined southern white communities. The loyalties and activities of elites and middle-class migrants became a key resource for African American communities, while white, middle class expatriates kept their distance from working class migrants, limiting the possibilities for group institution building and political influence. White southern migrants were influential in the promotion of evangelical churches, the development and spread of country music, and in the particular brand of racial conservatism and white working class politics that benefited from southern white symbolism.
African American influence was more comprehensive and consequential: the building of communities in the major cities in America during a period when those cities monopolized important forms of power, especially in media (publishing houses, newspapers, magazines, record companies, theatre, and film), inspired African American literature and artistic endeavors in a myriad of forms and in a slow, but steady and meaningful acknowledgement of its worth. Politically, the particular arrangement of parties, unions, and municipal and federal governments in northern metropolises, especially during the "long New Deal," gave black voters and activists opportunities to leverage governmental power. By working with allies that were available only in those places, by finding balance-of-power openings that appeared as urban regimes reorganized (and as the northern democratic Party tried to consolidate its hold on federal power)-while using tactics that were safe and effective only in those settings-the seams of power were loosened in a governmental system that previously had rarely responded to the demands of socially despised minorities (pages 325-327). Finally, regional reconstruction was the other
important legacy of the Southern Diaspora. Over time, black and white migrants southernized aspects of the regions they settled by introducing tastes, practices, and institutions-including food, music, religion, accents, and political styles-that moderated the differences between the
South and the rest of the United States (page 327).

In my opinion, Gregory has successfully presented a thematic history of the black and white disapora from the American South to points North and West. The only weakness, as I see it, is that this examination could not have been made in a more chronological, and less thematic fashion. Or given the daunting nature of his effort, if the had been more satisfied to provide a more intensive examination of only one or only several of his intended themes, the work would not give this reader a sense of being "all over the place." Nevertheless, Gregory has contributed a
necessary work of revisionist history of scholastic depth and eminent readability.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in American history.

I found this CD at a thrift store, and what a find it was! The actors' voices are so well-tuned into a child's way of thinking: cadence, choice of character voice, and emotion are wonderful throughout. Having grown up watching Bea Arthur, Mary Tyler Moore (my hero!) Lily Tomlin and Ed Asner, it can bring tears to imagine these people taking time to create such a fine piece of children's literature. I also have Paula Poundstone's POP TART comedy VHS, and her gentleness is obvious there also. I hope "Completely Yours" gets re-released, as my CD has finally cracked from loving use.

I liked the tape very much. My son who is 8 months old likes to listen to the different voices. I like that it has the voices I grew up with, Ed Asner, Bea Arthur, Lily and Mary. My favorite part is the song "Just the Same" by Margaret Bailey. I would love to find more songs by her. My only regret is that it is so short (18 minutes).