NATURAL HISTORY

A little paean to brotherly love, animal protection, and peace—along the lines of Ruth Krauss' The Big World and the Little House and other idealistic constructs of the Forties and Fifties. But to counter the abstractness and impersonality here the language is inappropriately hopped-up ("Our planet is a lively ball in the universe"); disparate phenomena are linked and tacitly equated ("But little puffs of smoke erupt where men are fighting, or shooting ducks, or breaking mountains"); basic appositions are simplistic ("Old people look in garbage cans hopefully" while "Low trees hold fruit"); and the outcome is anything but natural history: "Waves of wheat and corn shimmer in the sun. They are made for people. They're made for cows who nurse their calves. They're made for gray wolves with their pups. . . ." Don't believe in a grain-eating wolf till you see one.