The Crane (New York Review Children's Collection)

By Reiner Zimnik

Book Overview

The blue-capped man who operates the crane is so attached to the machine that he never leaves it in war or in peace. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 159017075X
• ISBN13: 9781590170755
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Length: 98 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.3" x 5.5"
• Age Range: 9 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 4 to 7

Customer Reviews

On Duty

I share the high esteem of the other reviewers. I would not describe the book as about war, though war occurs. The book started slowly but ripened to a lovely fullness in the end. I read it to my kids and they enjoyed it. More than anything I found it about duty and finding meaning and joy in the faithful accomplishment of one's lifework. When I must work on a weekend or at night, the kids seem to understand when I tell them, "I am the crane man!" This is a book that will be welcomed in the homes of all those whose lives are lived with a proud and joyous devotion to family, friends, and work. It brought to mind the sentiment at the end of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, "As the lively and sparkling emotions of her early married live cohered into an equable serenity, the finer movements of her nature found scope in discovering to the narrow-lived ones around her the secret (as she had once learnt it) of making limited opportunities endurable; which she deemed to consist in the cunning enlargement, by a species of microscopic treatment, of those minute forms of satisfaction that offer themselves to everybody not in positive pain; which, thus handled, have much of the same inspiring effect upon life as wider interests cursorily embraced."

A Parable of War

The Crane is a nice, interesting story. Behind the story is is the parable of what happens when war comes. It is a great lesson in life and a great classic