The Children’s Book of Home and Family

A wonderful treasury of stories, poems, biographies, and more. From the inspirational biographies of Teddy Roosevelt and Jane Addams to heartwarming stories such as “Ruth and Naomi” that will captivate young listeners, this beautifully illustrated hardcover is destined to become a classic. A must-have for every family!Conservative social critic and former Bush “drug czar” William J. Bennett collects here over 30 secular fables, prayers, Bible stories, and poems, all devoted to a central theme: “reinforcing the vital lessons all parents must teach” about home and family life.

Some of the entries address intersibling relations (like “The Hill,” adapted from Laura Richards, and Aesop’s classic “The Bundle of Sticks”), while others focus on the love of husbands and wives for their children (“What Bradley Owed,” adapted from Hugh T. Kerr) and for one another (“The Water of Youth,” adapted from Rudolph Baumbach). Poems and prayers from Alfred, Lord Tennyson (“What Does Little Birdie Say?”) and Robert Louis Stevenson (“Prayer for Home and Family”) help class up the book, complementing Michael Hague’s ’50s-style, quasi-Rockwellian illustrations.

While many of the lessons imparted here are inarguably “vital,” parents should beware that the book still carries some not-so-subtle political freight, which you might or might not buy into: As Bennett makes clear in his grownup books (The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American Family, etc.), references to “husband and wife” mean that and only that. Likewise, don’t be surprised by antiquated takes on gender roles (as in “The Husband Who Was to Mind the House”) and that the only black characters in the book have tribal names like Keen-Eyes, Sharp-Ears, and Strong-Arms. (The sole Hispanic family lucks out with some good Catholic names, but Hague’s proto-Israelites in a King Solomon story still look pretty conventionally European.) (Ages 9 to 12) –Paul Hughes