Aesop's Fables (Junior Classics)

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Summary: Aesop's Fables
Review: Aesop's Fables is a great book that is a collection of short stories. This book gave us famous phrases that are used today, such as "sour grapes." These are easy to understand stories for all ages(unless you are under the age of 7). It's amazing that such small stories have great meaning. Every fable gives some kind of small lesson at the end. The characters fit each story very well. This book is a must read for people who wonder where some of our everyday phrases come from and who want to learn a lesson from just a few sentences.

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Summary: Aesop's Fables, told as they were intended: for adults
Review: Culturally we are now at the point when "Slow but steady wins the race," "Look before you leap," and "Necessity is the mother of invention" are considered wise sayings passed down from generation to generation. But even if you know these proverbs you might have forgotten, or probably never knew in the first place, that they were first said by an ex-slave named Aesop two thousand years ago and each was the moral to one of his fables. This particular collection of Aesop's fables is based on the 19th-century research and translation of George Fyler Townsend, for whom the stories were moral lessons intended for an ADULT audience rather than simply children's stories about anthropomophic animals. Because he used animals with human strengths and weaknesses, Aesop's tales have been directed over the years more towards children; I heard of lot of them for the first time on a record by the Smothers Brothers. But Townsend restores the style and sophistication that are not commonly found in the juvenile editions of Aesop. In addition to the familiar fables like "The Fox and the Grapes" and "The Hare and the Tortoise" there are dozens of lesser known fables uncovered by Townsend and included in the over 300 fables included in this edition, which makes this collection one of the more comprehensive of its kind.

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Summary: Not what I was Wanting
Review: I bought this on cassette to entertain my 4-year-old during our 30-minute ride to school in the mornings. It was a complete failure, but to be fair the fault is probably my own ignorance of Aesop's Fables. The stories are VERY brief-- just enough to set up the moral at the end, not enough to set up any drama or catch my 4-year-old's interest. The morals themselves are worded in old-fashioned and/or very sophisticated language and are pretty much incomprehensible to this age child. I could perhaps see having this in book format and reading one or two stories at bed time, but for my needs the cassette at least is pretty useless. We'll be going back to the Jim Weiss stories on tape (which we've quite enjoyed).