Rudyard Kipling Books

This story has a great moral to it as well as being very entertaining and interesting to both children and adults. The plus side of the cassette is that Jack Nicholson tells it in such a way that everyone will enjoy listening to it over and over again. The illustrations are perfect to fit the story and are great at intriguing the children. We have had this story through both of our sons and they both STILL enjoy this book. Hopefully will pass it on to the grandchildren. Tell your friends and family about this one.

Danny Glover reads this, and I enjoyed it as much (maybe more) than my daughter. This book and "How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin" sold us on Rabbit Ears audiobooks - we now have about a dozen. Get the full size so the child can follow the text easier and you can both enjoy the illustrations.

I was quite fortunate to locate a new edition of Humorous Tales from Rudyard Kipling; it was first published in 1931 by Macmillan. My 1993 edition from Studio Editions (London) is enhanced by high quality ink illustrations by Reginald Cleaver.

Like many readers, I have on occasion read the more popular stories by Kipling. I had known, of course, that Kipling was prolific writer, had been immensely popular in the early twentieth century, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I also knew that his writings were now viewed as outdated. I made little effort to read Kipling. What a mistake!

This rather extensive compilation, some 500 pages of Kipling's more humorous tales, has completely changed my perspective. I thoroughly enjoyed these stories, and undoubtedly, in a year or two, I will reread this entire collection.

I cannot recall a single story that I would not readily read again. Some stories made extensive used of various dialects and did require effort, but this effort was more than repaid. I had not previously encountered even one of these thirty remarkable entries - either prose or poetry. This fact clearly demonstrates both my limited familiarity with Rudyard Kipling as well as the wealth of his works that exist.

If it's good enough for Grandpa Simpson, it should be good enough for you:

"If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss -- and lose, and start again at your beginnings, and never breathe a word about your loss, yours is the earth is everything that is in it, and, which is more, you'll be a man, my son."

Meticulous scholarship and passionate care rekindles the best traditions of Western civilization in this remarkable treatment of Kipling as a touchstone of the hopes, possibilities, uncharted territories of governance, and human problems of the British Empire at its height. McBratney draws on critical and cultural anthropoligical publications of Kipling's day and later, up to the present, with ingenious exhaustiveness and care to identify the state of the art of civilization attained at the time, using the hopes and dreams of a number of Kipling's most striking characters to illustrate the painful nexus occupied by Kipling, the writer, poet, novelist, journalist and artist, as a touchstone of his time and place. The approach is deep and clear. In treating Kipling's work as anthropological artifact as well as thematic compendia, both synchronically and diachronically as Kipling aged, McBratney makes a contribution towards the best humanity by placing Kipling definitely in Western civilization's universalist project of creating it.

In the aftermath of Kipling's loss of his 18-year old son in World War One, the famous writer was asked to write a history of his son's regiment. He consented at once and began immediately, embarking on a task which would take five and a half years.
The devotion and the skill of one of the great masters of the language are manifest here, in what Kipling called "my great work...done with agony and bloody sweat", producing a work that stands as a literary masterpiece, as well as superb military history.
Sarpedon is to be congratulated for this excellent edition of an unjustly neglected work, which is in two volumes, one for each battalion, reissued with rare photos and the original excellent maps.

(The "score" rating is an ineradicable feature of the page. This reviewer does not "score" books.)

My favorite books from childhood have always been Milne's "The World of Pooh" and Kipling's "The Jungle Book". Over the years I have purchased many copies of each as presents. Both can be difficult to find in versions unaltered from the original. I have found this to be particularly true in the case of The Jungle Book. Some folks just don't seem to get that Kipling had a pretty good handle on what he was doing. One does not tamper with a Masterpiece.

This version is the real thing. It reads word for word the same as the tattered, 40-year-old copy that I first read when I was eight years old. Add illustrations by Robert Ingpen that faithfully capture the emotion of the story and you have a real winner. For those who appreciate The Jungle Book as it was BEFORE it was adulterated by Mr. Disney and friends, this is a very worthy effort.

Excellent book. We've read it to our children at bedtime -- ages five and UNDER. They don't understand all of it so ask great questions. We've even searched the Internet for mongoose information and other jungle information with our five year old. Super read!

It is hard for me to find books for my boys with dyslexia. The books at their reading level are boring to them, but the books they want to read are too hard. This series is an answer to a prayer! The stories are exciting (in this one, it's implied that the mongoose is almost eaten by a snake). My boys love them.

Our 4 year old son is captivated by the storyline and sits contently for the telling of the whole story. Well written interpretation of the classic story in a condensed and easy to understand form.