The Baby Whale Sharp Ears

James Y. Beaty

If you want a disturbing gauge of the decline of Western civilization, read a kids' book from the thirties and contrast it with the kids' books of today. While some of today's offerings for the under-eight set are truly fun (Emily Gravett's wonderful books come to mind), none are what you'd call language-intensive. The average reader can polish one off in twenty minutes. Then you open a book like The Baby Whale Sharp Ears. Your head will melt. This was a book for the four to seven crowd in 1938? Why, yes. Yes, it was.

We go through the first four years of the life of a baby sperm whale. (You can probably guess his name.) During that time he travels around the world getting into various misadventures, and the reader learns a lot about the life of the average sperm whale-- migration patterns, dangers they face (while the stuff about whaling ships seems a bit dated these days, the rest of the problems Sharp Ears face are still quite contemporary), and their day-to-day life.

It would be great, though probably an awful marketing decision, for a company to bring a number of these books back into print and get them back into the schools. Challenging today's kids with books of this length and complexity seems like a fine idea for increasing general literacy. It wouldn't hurt the kids to learn something while they're at it.