Now We Are Six (World of Pooh Collection) - Softcover

A.A. Milne grew up in a school - his parents ran Henley House in Kilburn, for young boys - but never intended to be a children's writer. Pooh he saw as a pleasant sideline to his main career as a playwright and regular scribe for the satirical literary magazine, Punch. Writing was very much the dominant feature of A.A. (Alan Alexander)'s life. He joined the staff of Punch in 1906, and became Assistant Editor. In the course of two decades he fought in the First World War, wrote some 18 plays and three novels, and fathered a son, Christopher Robin Milne, in 1920 (although he described the baby as being more his wife's work than his own!). Observations of little Christopher led Milne to produce a book of children's poetry, When We Were Very Young, in 1924, and in 1926 the seminal Winnie-the-Pooh. More poems followed in Now We Are Six (1927) and Pooh returned in The House at Pooh Corner (1928). After that, in spite of enthusiastic demand, Milne declined to write any more children's stories as he felt that, with his son growing up, they would now only be copies based on a memory. In one way, Christopher Robin turned out to be more famous than his father, though he became uncomfortable with his fame as he got older, preferring to avoid the literary limelight and run a bookshop in Dartmouth. Nevertheless, he published three volumes of his reminiscences before his death in 1996.

We could have a Winnie-the-Pooh convention with all the audiobook versions that have cropped up this season. All are quite classic renditions of the Pooh stories--particularly welcome after the recent trend that made every story into a cartoon. It's quite hard to make distinctions among these except to say that if you'd prefer an American voice reading Pooh's adventures with Eeyore, Piglet, Roo, Owl and Christopher Robin, try Charles Kuralt's readings. They may sound a bit like On the Road With Pooh and Piglet, but Kuralt's avuncular voice takes the perfect tone for the longer stories of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House At Pooh Corner. He's fully relaxed and lets the narrative take its familiar path while keeping the whimsy fresh. Families can enjoy this reading and parents will appreciate the understated British humor as they become part of the audience instead of narrators themselves. R.F.W. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine