I picked up this brilliant picture book from Payless Books yesterday. Elephant Elephant: A Book of Opposites, by Francesco Pittau and Bernadette Gervais, is like nothing I've ever seen before.
Elephants illustrate all the usual antonyms like "fat" and "thin" and "tall" and "short"; as well as unusual ones like "plugged" and "unplugged" which shows an elephant, full of water, with a cork up its butt; and one without, leaking all over the floor. "Boy" and "girl" shows the difference in sexes with elephants peeing and there's "sealed" and "unsealed" which shows an elephant with a zipped-up side-flap on one hand and an unzipped pachyderm on the other, with all its organs showing.
Parents who think only in sweet pastels and cute rhymes might think this book is subversive, but I love its humour and inventiveness.
My favourite pair of opposites? The elephants that illustrate "clever" and "stupid" - they look exactly alike, which is so true: you can't judge someone's intelligence by the way they look!
Sounds like something right up my alley :)!
p/s will respond to your email soon - a list that definitely is so personally definitive that it needs some mulling over!
Posted by: Hsian | Saturday, June 04, 2005 at 02:51