Word: alphabet
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...Caslon Players are not actors; they are letters. The name of the troupe refers to their typography. As for the play, it consists of cavorting onstage in this year's most original alphabet book, The Z Was Zapped (Houghton Mifflin; $15.95). Chris Van Allsburg's narrative grants each performer an alliterative role: the D was nearly Drowned, the I was nicely Iced, the Y was Yanked away. His mastery of pencil and graphite dust humanizes the characters and lends them an air of drama, as if they were about to receive major parts in the theater of words, paragraphs...
...Junior plays with his building blocks, he can now learn the ABC's of post-modernism. A is for Aporia, B is for Barthes, C is for Chiasma. D, the most important letter in the alphabet of the nouveau ecriture, is for Dualism, Deconstruction, Dissemination, and of course, Derrida. And when Junior begins to put letters together to form a word (which we now call a logos), he has a whole new set of challenges ahead of him. For difference is now spelled differance, while the prefix 'meta' opens infinite new realms of meaning...
...abecedarians, people who are learning the alphabet. This season they and their families are in luck: three ABC books offer a bright amalgam of sophistication and simplicity. In Pigs from A to Z (Houghton Mifflin; $15.95), Arthur Geisert's suite of copper etchings follows siblings with curly tails and mischievous minds as they construct a wolfproof tree house by the letters. En route, the illustrator-author ingeniously employs words that describe his book (eerie, ideal, spectacular) and performs the hardest task in children's literature: enlightening with surprises...
...From Alphabet to Zigzag, a shelf of season's readings offers children the delights of seeing and learning. -- The year's ten best books...
...early in Thornton Wilder's The Skin Of Our Teeth. And this would seem to be good advice to follow in a play that shows the cyclical and precarious nature of life at such a fast pace that the Ice Age, the Depression and the invention of the alphabet are simultaneous events...