Word: bookings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...visual narrative is so controlled, and his costumes and customs so accurate, that history assumes a personality. Moving by lively steps, it arranges hemlines and coats, advances from midwives to doctors, from town criers to village schools, to the ambiguous benefits of buses and telephones. No other Christmas book can cover so many centuries between the final story and the good-night kiss...
...very young would do well to try a simpler volume, Ancient Egyptian Design Coloring Book (Dover; $1.50) by Ed Sibbett Jr. The motifs of cobra-goddesses, scarabs and animal deities are outlined with precision, and hints about traditional hues (red skin for men, yellow for women) can make anyone who owns a box of crayons into a high-chair archaeologist...
...ambition to play the palace, but his hunger for riches leads him on, only to prove that travel is narrowing and that no one can become truly rich until he looks into his hearth and soul. The back-in-your-own-backyard conclusion is timeworn, but the book's slow cadences and sprightly tones lend it the character of a legend that can never grow old because it was never young...
...tall?-there can be no more elegant and reassuring self-help book than Karla Kuskin's Herbert Hated Being Small (Houghton Mifflin; $6.95). Herbert gauges his mini-stature by standing next to his parents, always a mistake. Depressed, he sets out on his own. So does Philomel, who feels humongous next to her little family. But when boy and girl meet in the woods, they discover that they are the same size. Everything is relative, observes this cascade of wise rhymes. Einstein would have been pleased...
...year's most perverse children's book is Raymond Briggs' Fungus the Bogeyman (Random House; $4.95). Fungus is free to do what kids cannot: live underground, put grease in his hair, make things go bump in the night and in general be a grain of sand in the public eye. His adventures cover oversized pages full of puns ("Hullo, my dreary," "my direling") and bile green anatomy charts that provide a perfect send-up for the child who has ODed on gnomes and faeries...