Kids Books

It has been a couple of years since somebody suggested that I should get the "Where the Sidewalk Ends" by Shel Silverstein for my son, and I did. Since then I bought a whole bunch of Shel Silverstein's books, "Lafcadio, the lion who shot back" being one of the last ones. I was really amazed by that book and by the problems it touched on and made kids think about. The lion in this book is first living in the jungle, then he takes away a gun from a hunter that wanted to hunt him and learns to shoot, becomes the best shooter in the jungle, meets an impresario who helps him to become rich and famous, begins to live like a human and almost forgets that he is a lion, until one day his rich human friends tell him "let's go to Africa and hunt some lions" and he goes with them to Africa, where he meets a lion who reminds him that he shouldn't be killing lions because he is also a lion. Lafcadio is being torn in opposite directions when his friends are telling him to go with them and hunt some of his own kind and by the lion who says "let's go and kill some people". He leaves everybody at the end of the story, because he doesn't want to side with either one of them. It's a very sad story which depicts one of those situations that make us think...