Uncle Remus: The Complete Tales

This is a brilliant and lively retelling of the Brer Rabbit stories. The kids love it and never let me stop at one story. It's an absolute riot. As Julius Lester writes, folk tales are intended to be told and retold. This version does it with wit and style, liberating the stories from Chandler's unreadable semi-phonetic transliterations while retaining the speech patterns, and most importantly, losing non of the original spirit of the stories. These are the real Brer Rabbit stories vividly retold and brought back to life. This book is an absolute favorite at our house.

Joel Chandler Harris did a wonderful job collecting African American Folk Tales in the original dialect spoken by the people who told him the stories (slaves). This edited version carries a hint of the dialect. The simplified dialect makes these stories more accessible to the average person today. Many of the stories can be found in collections African Folk Tales. They are full of wit and wisdom.

Julius Lester has updated the language of the popular Joel Chandler Harris tales into contemporary, comprehensible, and amusing English.This is a real service for fans of Br'er Rabbit and his associates. The stories are well told and boast many an interesting twist at the end. Pickus's abundant black and white and two-page color illustrations form a rich complement to this beautiful treasury. A real "keeper" for many collections.

In his retelling of the "Uncle Remus" stories (first collected by Joel Chandler Harris), Mr. Lester takes some liberties. Mr. Lester's Uncle Remus is undefined, a narrator who lends a clear and distinctive voice to the stories, yet is never identified or described, unlike the elderly ex-slave of the Harris tellings. This was done so the reader could develop his or her own ideas of just who the new Uncle Remus is. Second, Mr. Lester unabashedly uses modern language and references (like shopping malls and the like). There are those who would say that by doing so Mr. Lester is ruining the Uncle Remus stories. However, Mr. Lester makes it very clear that his intent was not to ruin the stories, but to save them.This assertion is underscored by the fact that although the language of the book is modern, the stories themselves are largely untouched. Mr. Lester does not present us with the Disney version of Brer Rabbit; a likeable character who serves the role of passive protagonist. Mr. Lester's Brer Rabbit, like Harris' Brer Rabbit, is an unrepentent troublemaker whose cleverness does more than lift him out of jams. He steals, lies, stirs up conflict and on a few occasions, commits murder. In that sense, despite the updated language, Mr. Lester's versions are far closer to the source material than most authors who retell the Uncle Remus stories.I take nothing away from the works of Harris. For those who wish to read the original works in the original dialect and accept them as products of the age in which they were written, then the books are an excellent read. Unfortunately, most modern readers will not want to struggle with the dialect or accept Uncle Remus' congenial attitude towards his own enslavement. In that case, only scholars would read them and the stories would fall into obscurity. I for one praise Mr. Lester's efforts to keep the Uncle Remus stories alive and relevent. Yes, some changes were made, but don't forget, the stories were also changed when they were imported from Africa

I am a children's librarian and I have used many of the stories from this book in storytelling programs both in urban and suburban areas and the children love them. Buy it for your children or yourself. It is well worth the price.