All I See

Imagine if you saw a man`s painting but you were afraid of him.However the painting sucked you in to understand him more. This tale is about a young boy named Charlie and he visited a lake and found Gregory painting,whistling,and drifting in his canoe with his cat.What Charlie saw was one of the man`s midnight blue painting and that made him like him even more.One morning Charlie was going to see another painting Gregory should have painted for him that day. When he got there, there was no painting on the canvas. Since there was no painting, he decided to make a painting for Gregory while Gregory was in his canoe. when Gregory got back and saw the picture, he stared at it long and hard. What will Gregory say? I recomend this book to you because it's interesting and also the pictures are incredible. People who like creative art and fiction stories will fall in love with this tale.

When we first found this book at the library; the beautiful cover illustration first caught three-year-old Matthew's eye. Once home, it became his favorite book among the 20 or so that we had borrowed that week. I am not sure, nor can he verbally elaborate for me the draw of this book for him, but I will offer my own opinion. The tender, loving approach of the painter to the shy young boy, Charlie, is quite appealing. That the painter is male is all the more special as he becomes a wonderful role model for young boys bombarded by so many conflicting messages in the popular media. Matthew seemed to identify with the child in the story and began walking around with a pencil behind his ear, just the way Charlie and the painter do in the book. He also wanted to "get my paints, Mama" after reading the book. Lastly, the awakening of the affective and expressive side of this boy is a lovely process to observe and is elaborated beautifully by the watercolor illustrations throughout. I am confident that these too led Matthew to love this sweet, gentle book.

"If we observe the behavior of an animal we can only describe it from the outside. In a book on zoology you can read that bees build their cells in a certain way, their queen behaves in such and such a way, and so on. The physical activity of the insect or animal is described, but if we presume that such behavior is meaningful for the bees, then we have projected something onto them. We can only say that this is the way they appear to behave, and so far, we have no means of seeing how the thing looks from the point of view of the animal. We do not know what kind of emotion the queen bee has when producing her eggs. We can assume a great deal, but we cannot scientifically observe it." One of the most fortunate and unfortunate experiences of this magical living of a human life is that in that this same phenomenon comes into play in our many and varied interactions with fellow members of our species. It may seem to us in the realm of the physical that this or that person is reacting to this or that stimulus in this or that manner, usually based on our own personal experience with that particular stimulus. We assume that the people around us, most particularly the people we love, are experiencing the situation we are experiencing in the same or a similar manner. Not so, Oh friends. I am continually taken aback by the astonishing fact that what I see is not what you see. Usually this shock comes to me with all the pleasantness of those cups of ice-cold water my father used to toss over the shower curtain on me in the middle of my lengthy morning ablutions during my teen-age years. Cynthia Rylant, thankfully, has a lighter touch. With her characteristic grace, she reveals the fortunate aspect of disparate perceptions existing withing the same sphere. (Ah la, You say tuh-may-ato, I say tuh-mah-to..) Reading this one always makes me feel like I'm sitting in a warm quiet spot of sun. A fine job all 'round.