"You know, Toad," said Frog with his mouth full, "I think we
should stop eating. We will soon be sick." "You are right," said
Toad. "Let us eat one last cookie, and then we will stop." Many
"last cookies" later, Frog and Toad come up with an ingenious
solution to their uncontrolled cookie consumption.
This pair of amphibian pals likes to do everything together,
from list making to flower growing to dragon vanquishing. And when
Toad bakes cookies one day, the two try to develop willpower
內容簡介:
Frog and Toad are always together. Here are five wonderful
stories about flowers, cookies, bravery, dreams, and, most of all,
friendship.
During his distinguished career Arnold Lobel wrote andor
illustrated over 70 books for children. To his illustrating credit,
he had a Caldecott Medal book -- Fables 1981 -- and two Caldecott
Honor Books-his own Frog and Toad are Friends 1971 and Hildilid''s
Night by Cheli Duran Ryan 1972. To his writing credit, he had a
Newbery Honor Book -- Frog and Toad Together 1973. But to his
greatest credit, he had a following of literally millions of young
children with whom he shared the warmth and humor of his
unpretentious vision of life.
Though he was a born storyteller -- he began making up stories
extemporaneously to entertain his fellow second-graders in
Schenectady, New York, where he grew up in the care of his
grandparents. Mr. Lobel called himself a "lucky amateur" in terms
of his writing. Viewing himself as a professionally trained
illustrator he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Pratt
Institute, he said, "I know how to draw pictures. With writing, I
don''t really know what I''m doing. It''s very intuitive."
In addition to the Frog and Toad books, Owl at Home, Mouse
Tales, The Book of Pigericks, and many other popular books he
created, Mr. Lobel also illustrated other writers'' texts that
captured his fancy. He viewed this as "something different and
challenging." Often his illustrations for those books showed a
different aspect of his personality and his artistic expertise,
ranging from his meticulous dinosaurs in Dinosaur Time by Peggy
Parish to his chilling pen-and-ink drawings in Nightmares: Poems to
Trouble Your Sleep by Jack Prelutsky, about which Booklist wrote,
"Young readers will be amazed that the gentle Lobel of Frog and
Toad fame can be so comfortably diabolic."
In 1977 Mr. Lobel and his wife, Anita, a distinguished
children''s book author and artist in her own right, collaborated on
their first book, How the Rooster Saved the Day, chosen by School
Library Journal as one of the Best Books of the Year, 1977. They
then collaborated on three more books, A Treeful of Pigs, a 1979
ALA Notable Book; On Market Street, a 1982 Caldecott Honor Book;
and The Rose in My Garden, a 1984 Boston GlobeHorn Book Honor
Book.
Arnold Lobel died in 1987.