World Is So Big and I Am So Small

by William Kotzwinkle

Book Overview

Rhymed text and illustrations describe the activities of a very young rabbit from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 051756310X
• ISBN13: 9780517563106
• Release Date: September 1986
• Publisher: Random House Value Publishing
• Length: 24 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Age Range: 4 to 6 years
• Grade Range: Preschool to Grade 1

Customer Reviews

The Absolute Greatest Children's Book

I have never read a book with such emotional impact as William Kotzwinkle's opus "The World Is Big and I'm So Small." This is the perfect book for children, teenagers, adults, and the elderly. Raise your children on this book. Let them hang on to every word. TWIBAISS begins innocently enough, "'It's morning,' said the bird who could not fly. `Don't you wish,' said the fish, `we could swim through the sky?'" Do they ever get to swim through the sky, these mere playthings of a Plastic God? This is one of the many lifelong lessons this book holds: we should never stop chasing our fantasies, no matter how pointless the endeavor appears to be. We never see them fly (or swimming, for that matter) but sometimes in dreams... Has humanity been killed off and replaced by a race of anthropomorphic rabbit-people? Are they mutated rabbits? Mutated humans? Or just a holographic fantasy, much like the ones found on the Holodeck? It is all of these; it is none of these. We look into the abyss and the abyss looks back. We are Lagomorph. Inanimate objects dominate the landscape in this novel. Their voices permeate the already unsettling surroundings (see previous paragraph) for the first three pages. What does that tell us about ourselves? That we have become too dependent on technology (as the astronauts in 2001: A Space Odyssey learn at the hands of HAL all too well)? Perhaps. A page does not go by without some technology standing out like some sore thumb. But it is welcome. Too many books of this nature simply will away the progression of tools by placing its characters in a techno-void. With all of its comforts and truths (pots, newspapers, shovels), David Byrne would find the world of TWIBAISS appropriate. There is little more to say about this book.