I really liked the Beatrix Potter books and saw nothing strange re the animals wearing clothing, as a child. After all, when we were kids, we used to dress up our pets like dolls. I can recall being given one of those old dolls which were half black and half white, according to how you flipped them upside down. Recently, in the downtown old market of Charleston, I saw those dolls for sale. I would have thought they would have been banned, due to P.C. I remember loving "Little Black Sambo" as a child, but when I went to the USSR in the 60's, it was pointed out how this racism was a flaw in the American value system, and that of course, we Soviets, with our pure intents have no such values.... My parents took me to see the movie "Uncle Remus" when I was a child growing up in Atlanta, GA. I remember being driven by the former home of Joel Chandler Harris on the other side of my city. I thought the film charming and was shocked that it went out of circulation, when the P.C. police took over.... My grandmother gave me the Milne books in the 1940's. I loved the poems and could recite by heart the one about "My teddy bear is rather fat, " for years.

An add-on for whatever it is worth - In the early 1970s, I ran a retail flower shop in central Illinois. We did a good business and I had 11 full-time employees. When the flower holidays came around, I generally added three more people, just to keep up with stuff. Most of the employees were loyal and had been there for several years. One day, in the quiet summer, I gathered them for a short meeting. I asked them to consider something, have a meeting while I was out of the building and let me know what decision there was. What, if anything, would you like to have me do different in the way of making your time at the flower shop better. I asked and then left the building. I returned about 45 minutes later and they had a decision. I don't know if they voted or what. However, their decision was to have health insurance. That was uppermost in their minds. I investigated and decided that would be too expensive as an overhead item. I told them about my decision, but added that all would get an increase in their hourly wage to help compensate for what I could not offer. They seemed to be happy. I did not have health insurance at the time either. Remember, this was the early 1970s. Money is not always the reason that people go to work each day. It often has to do with the way they are treated. There are some efforts around the USA for restaurants to pay above minimum wage and post a sign that indicates that tips are not necessary. The help (front and back end) would be compensated better than what might be expected. A sole proprietor, such as the car service guy, gets whatever money is generated. He has expenses, of course, but he doesn't have to pay anyone for such things as dispatching, etc. All the money goes into his pocket. Tip him? I did not. He set his rates and has to live with them.

I only read War and Peace once, but I read Gone With the Wind three times - the first time when I was ten. As a teenager, I became fascinated with Thomas Hardy novels, partly because I always identified with his tragic heroines, and I tried to figure out why I could not identify with any of his male characters. I did not identify with any character in GWTW, and the only character I really liked was Mammy and maybe Rhett Butler. I read a lot as a teenager because I grew up on a farm, which I hated, and there was little else to do. When I was taking a graduate course in History of Architecture, I checked out three copies of Alberti's Ten Books on Architecture, one in the original Latin, one in archaic English (from from 1755), and a modern Italian translation, so that I could compare them. I found the Italian translation to be closer to the original Latin (and I did not want to try to read the entire book in Latin), and so I returned the Latin and English versions and read it in Italian. I read a couple of architecture books in French, but they weren't as good as the ones I could find in Italian. When I studied Ancient Greek Art, I found more books in German than in English, and I also read articles in Die Zeit from the 1930s that the library had on microfilm. I never did learn Greek beyond the alphabet, which is somewhat similar to Cyrillic, with which I was familiar from having studied Russian. At one time I considered going to graduate school to get a degree in comparative literature, but I would have had to go to Buffalo or Berkeley; Buffalo was too cold, and Berkeley was too expensive. I also realized that this degree would not have been very good for a career, other than teaching, and I really did not want to do that.

I didn't care for this, but DH is liking it: Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon I'm halfway into The Alienist, Caleb Carr (1994), which I came across in a list of historical mystery novels. The search for a serial killer is set against a detailed look at Manhattan in the late 19th Century. The killer is only differently repellent from the 'powers that be' in this rough and tumble period of crime bosses and protection racket cops preying on impoverished immigrants. Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt struggles to allow a pioneer psychiatrist (the 'alienist') as he builds a motivational template to identify the killer of very young boys employed as prostitutes. 4+ Stars.