A good introduction to the ethics of the Other, Levinas would be proud.

The division of the adult and childhood 'worlds', in which the latter actually triumphs; a true classic.

Freud says that the attempt to civilize the feral results in a plethora of neuroses - perhaps then, Max really should be a model for us all!

The friend / enemy distinction through the question of 'noise'. If Carl Schmitt and R. Murray Schaefer met, perhaps this is what they would discuss.

Cosgrove really needs to brush up on his Foucault. Rather than 'know thyself', the message ought to be 'take care of thyself'.

In Portland there is a monument dedicated to Cleary, which I have not visited yet, but this tale of anxiety and imagination was what got me started on her works from Ramona to Beezus and beyond.

This stuck with me - especially the image of the tree as a stump. Liberal environmentalism? I think it runs a little deeper than that - this is a critique of instrumental rationality for kids.

George is a chimpanzee who meets a white man in a yellow hat in Africa - while the authors escaped Nazi-occupied France with the first draft of this story, they probably didn't its African equivalent

Like Sendak's other great work, this picture book can be read most productively as a critique of civilization, organized authority and the entrapment of imagination.

Although this is a Christian story, it was one of my favorite records as a kid and got me interested in music probably more than any other cultural object.

An anticapitalist children's story, recommended by the critical political theorist Michael J. Shapiro for the way that it juxtaposes use-value and exchange-value.