Rating: 
Summary: Where is the music?
Review: This is not the same "Cat in the Hat" classic - there are NO songs, just a terrible reading of the book, a bunch of still pictures and a whiny fish to boot! (I much prefer Mr. Krinklebaum from the original) The reviewer rating above must assume that this is the classic original. The only reason it even gets one star is that my three year old found it midldy entertaining - only because we have read the book so many times! She did not, however, jump and dance like she does to the other - ...
Rating: 
Summary: UUUUUHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Review: It's rare that an author can go on in the memories of others for as long as Seuss has, but this definitely started the ball rolling for him. It's a classic, no doubt there, so don't pass it by for your children. Who can't remember a rainy day as a child, nothing to do but look out the window and be bored, bored, bored?! But, in walks the zany cat who wants to have fun, but really doesn't know how. Instead, he tries but ends up messing up the house entirely, but he does know how to clean up and that little machine causes a lot of discussion in our house ("Mommy, why don't we have one of those? How does that work?", etc.). What I think is really good in this book is that it teaches children to do what is right, even though something may actually look like fun. The little boy in the story actually captures Thing One and Two and makes the cat leave with them. He could have joined in the mayhem but instead, honored what he had been taught and made the cat stop. The story is just fabulous and stirs all kinds of imagination in children. Great, great book and a staple for everyone's library.
Rating: 
Summary: Miss Green's Class, Room 18, Lee Elementary - Azusa, CA
Review: We like the characters in this book, especially the talking fish. The kids should never have let anyone or anything in their house while their mom was gone. It was fun to hear and to say the rhyming words and it helped us learn to read. You can read this book over and over again and it will still be fun.
Rating:
Summary: Cat and Chaos
Review: The Cat in the Hat has no other name--symbolic of his role as Chaos. He comes to visit two children, the predictable (as in "orderly") Boy and Girl at home. Inexplicably, the parents have left these two underaged children at home with no babysitter and no good sense to refuse entry to a patently dangerous beast who has regrettable taste in headgear. This is significant; despite the fact Mom And Dad represent Order in the equation, they introduce Chaos into the system by abandoning their kids. From that small oversight, the rest of the chaotic events unfold with Greek-tragedy-like inevitability, though with an unpredictable outcome. How like the universe this is; the stars in their courses, but the weather is utter madness.
The Cat roams rampant through the suburban home, pretty much doing what you and I and these two kids would LOVE to do but wouldn't dare--everything Mom and Dad tell you "not to." In psychological terms, the Cat is fulfilling the deepest desires of the children--to be really, really BAD, but without any consequences whatsoever. It's alluring, giddy, intoxicating, and it's SCARY, too. Disorder, like a roller-coaster ride, runs frighteningly and ultimately, downhill.
Just before the authoritarian ORDER figure Mom (much more symbolic of order than Dad--this IS the Fifties and you can bet she does all the housework) anyway, Mom's reappearance is imminent and the Cat uses an unlikely device to vacuum up the mess and restore all as it was--in essence reversing entropy. This is accomplished effortlessly and with no visible source of power. Here is a golden opportunity to discuss the Second Law of Thermodynamics* with your kids. A good exercise would be to try to calculate the energy that would have been required to run such a device. Question: would the device the Cat uses to clean the mess be able to run off a car battery, or would it require, oh, say, a fast breeder reactor the size of Yokohama? You do the math.
This endurable children's classic is essential to teaching the young about responsibility, temptation, thermodynamics and chaos theory. You can't begin too early.
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*The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that "in all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves the system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state." This is also known as entropy--or disorder.
Rating:
Summary: Cat in the Hat - a hard-hitting novel of prose and poetry
Review: If you haven't read tCitH, buy the book right now. Buy/read all Dr Seuss books, today, and mercilessly indoctrinate your offspring. Or, you could doom them to never having a sense of humour; they're your offspring, so it's your choice...Yeah, we've seen the Grinch, which was really a good interpretion. (for my money, Jim Carey will osmote into Jack Nicholson, history repeats.) But Mike Myers is overstretching himself this time. He's just not cool enough to be the Cat. Carey probably could've been, Myers will fail. Even in the preview mpgs, it just sucks. Pretend the movie doesn't exist, it's ugly and nasty, read the books, watch the cartoon... Myers has got it bottom-backwards; the cat's careless irresponsibility is the core of the character, dictating "right-minded correct behaviour" is just dumb. Kids got brains... Ah, jeez, it's so depressing. The Cat is an iconic figure, and Myers is gonna destroy him, 'cos he's run out of ideas. (Wayne, Austin P, worn out..) It'll be like the the Batman films, which were all garbage, betraying the Batman concept, (c.f. the Superman films, which really portrayed Supes, "the blue booby". Bats is much darker, and smarter than the films, etc..) So don't go see the Cat in the hat film, until you've read the books. After the film, you'll want to read all the other books, and won't go to see Cat in the Hat II; more inane japes.
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