"A new approach designed to stimulate and develop a child's creative thought process ... These funny fables expose young children to advanced learning concepts in mathematics and science while they smile ..."--Cover back
In this imaginative and illuminating work, Annabel Patterson traces the origins and meanings of the Aesopian fable, as well as its function in Renaissance culture and subsequently. She shows how the fable worked as a medium of political analysis and communication, especially from or on behalf of the politically powerless. Patterson begins with an analysis of the legendary Life of Aesop, its cultural history and philosophical implications, a topic that involves such widely separated figures as La Fontaine, Hegel, and Vygotsky. The myth’s origin is recovered here in the saving myth of Aesop the Ethiopian, black, ugly, who began as a slave but become both free and influential, a source of political wisdom. She then traces the early modern history of the fable from Caxton, Lydgate, and Henryson through the eighteenth century, focusing on such figures as Spenser, Sidney, Lyly, Shakespeare, and Milton, as well as the lesser-known John Ogilby, Sir Roger L’Estrange, and Samuel Croxall. Patterson discusses the famous fable of The Belly and the Members, which, because it articulated in symbolic terms some of the most intransigent problems in political philosophy and practice, was still going strong as a symbolic text in the mid-nineteenth century, where it was focused on industrial relations by Karl Marx and by George Eliot against electoral reform.
Memoirs of Birnbaum (b. 1922), a Polish Jew who lived in Piotrków Trybunalski and in Dąbrowa Gornicza. In 1942 he was sent to the Anhalt labor camp near Auschwitz, and then to five other labor camps: Markstadt, Ludwigsdorf (a munitions factory), Graditz, Langenbielau, and Faulbrück. At the last two camps he was sent to work in a parachute factory. There, he was sentenced to death by a German civil court for arson, but the SS claimed jurisdiction over him because he was a number and not a person, thereby saving him. He was liberated by the Russians in May 1945 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1949. An appendix on pp. 153-174 relates the fate of the Piotrkow Jews in the Holocaust.