Customer Reviews

The Diggers

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"The Diggers" was my absolute favorite book as a child, nearly 40 years ago. The main attraction was the pictures, obviously. So when I saw that it was back in print I wiped the tears of joy from my eyes and ordered it immediately. Imagine my disappointment when the book arrived, full of bland, boring, politically correct 1990s pop art!! The wonderful old two-tone sepia and green drawings in the original were dream-inspiring. Margaret Wise Brown is an old favorite but I wouldn't call her a master of the pen. Her books are dear to us because of the magical combinations of low-key narrative and old-fashioned art. Set to computer-generated modern graphic ..., the old manuscripts do nothing for me. BRING BACK THE ORIGINAL -- PLEASE!!! Thanks all.

My daughter got this for her 2nd birthday 2 years ago, and she adores it. I am a huge Daniel Kirk fan, and the illustrations are outstanding. It is so refreshing to see brilliantly done oil paintings in a children's book (while most of them are cartoons, computer-generated, or pale watercolor). I am not much of a Margaret Wise Brown fan, but the rhythmic prose was catchy, and a joy to read. It was and remains one of my daughter's favorite books.

What could be better for a boy of 2 1/2? After three days with this book my son was actually reciting pages of it to me. And the lyricism pervasive in all of Wise's books makes it a pleasure to read and to hear.

A great story about an excavator. Has lots of rhyme

This is an updated edition with new man-and-machine oil painting illustrations. This is not your Garth Williams little ducks and sheep picture book! The story here is almost weird -- it's much more surreal and asymmetrical than Margaret Wise Brown's usual fare. There's no regular rhyme scheme, there's no cyclical story, and nothing really works out in the end. *I* like this, and found the kind of tangential expansiveness interesting and cool. But fans of _The Runaway Bunny_ and _Goodnight Moon_ and that kind of thing might find themselves out of their comfort zone. The illustrations are VERY cool though, and a big steam shovel digs all the way under a mountain. Good for kids who like construction machines! All in all, I think it's a beautiful, imaginative book that prompts my child to think in a different way than the usual "wrapped up in a bow" story does.

Your opinion may differ, but I find the prose in this book to be terribly awkward. Various words rhyme on a page, but not with any set pattern, and thus the narrative ends up being stilted, with no good cadence. (Maybe if I read it 20 more times, I'll do a better job of anticipating the rhyming and cadence.) The story isn't terribly interesting, and it's also rather disjointed. Illustrations seem to be second-rate imitations of a 'heroic' art style from times past; definitely not the real thing. Some relatively famous names may be involved with this book, but there are much more enjoyable children's books out there. (Try "Clickety Clack", for example."

This book is fantastic. My 3 1/2 year old loves it and asks to read it all the time. It has all of his favorite things...dirt, diggers, trains and more!

...actually my 6 & 8 year olds don't mind it at all either! My 3 year old is also 'reading' this book after just 2 readings by my husband and i...came on here to buy it for him! The pictures are great although the one shown with the shovel is different than the one we took out from the library with a big yellow digger bucket with the words 'the diggers' on it! love all these old classics and since haven't found the old one can't compare, but we just took 5 train books out of the library and this is the favorite of our family! AND being an engineer myself love that it shows the process of how they would build the railroad!!! def. would recommend this book to anyone with kids who like trains, trucks, diggers or digging to china!

I ordered this book over a year ago from Amazon. The book came dirty, with pages stuck together and ripped, and I couldn't get hold of anyone at Amazon to assist me. I still have this book, and am very annoyed at Amazon and the seller for sending me a bad book and not returning any responses.