and I am a halloween nut. My kids and I love this book! The pop ups are awesome and the quality of the book is excellent. What I am not quite sure of is the dialoge/storyline that goes with it. I have looked at and read this book numerous times and still have no clue who the “doctor” is.is it Dr.Frankenstein?

Dr. Doolittle perhaps? I am left anxious with no idea who the mysterious doctor is and in the last page, just where did he go? I am thinking he is in the wooden box heading for Translyvania and trying in vain to saw himself out yet when I peek into the box, I see no doctor, just a bomb with a lit fuse! Cool pop ups but pretty bizarre story to go along with it.

award winning director and comedy writer Carl Reiner produces a real spine chiller. He also offers plenty of outs for the faint of heart: “Is it getting too scary for you? Should I keep going? Okay, if you say so.” No red blooded young reader will be able to resist this tantalizing tale of monsters and mystery. The narrator depicted by Jerry Seinfeld’s Halloween illustrator, James Bennett, to look exactly like Carl Reiner cozies up with his granddaughter to tell her all about the man he met when he was a child: Mr. Neewollah. Mr. Neewollah has a crooked smile we have several creepy child’s eye views and some very strange hobbies. Young Carl is lured into his basement workshop only to be scared out of his wits by fake eyeballs, creaking doors, and creepy things covered with cloth not to mention hideous monsters. But is Mr. Neewollah truly as sinister as he seems? In his first book for children, Reiner gets that kids love to be spooked and to know that all is well, too. Bennett’s exaggerated illustrations, featuring weird angles and vivid, in your face close ups, are a good match for Reiner&’s Halloween tale. Too busy in your own evil workshop to read aloud to the kids? Fear not! The book includes a CD featuring Reiner reading the story accompanied by eerie sound effects. Ages 6 to 9 Emilie Coulter

This is a very cute book but I have to say that the cd does make the story. We have read it but isn’t the same without the cd. The first time we did the story with the cd my son was sitting across the room and didn’t want to do it but his younger brother did. Funny though my oldest would peek at the book and finally was on my lap helping turning the pages when needed. Also this is a good book for children who aren’t used to listening to a story being read from a cd or tape, just another interesting way to enjoy a book!

I am a substitute teacher and one day I happen to be working in the library. I had to show this book to a group of second and third graders. They loved it. The cd provides a great mood. It was of course during Halloween time and the book has a Halloween theme to it. Its a little scary but not too much. Your going to love to see the reaction of the kids.

This is an excellent book for kids of all ages! My 5 year old twins first heard this when they were 3 and had me make it into a movie for them. My 7th and 8th grade students also love it, especially at Halloween! It is even more enjoyable with the CD. I highly recommend this book!

and certainly nothing to do with “torment.” Readers with a broad and reaching knowledge of Halloween may also disagree with Heller’s conclusion that “vampires, werewolves, and mummies” are in any way fundamental to the holiday’s “liturgy.”

Nor, as Heller states, is Halloween essentially about “being scared out of one’s wits.” Fear was merely the human byproduct incidentally produced by the supernatural agencies believed to freely walk the earth while the veil between worlds was at its weakest each All Hallows’ Eve. Even the products of the American commercial haunted house industry, which manifest across the landscape during the fall, are rarely, if ever, frightening. Heller seems to have confused the contemporary vulgar corporate mindset, which panders to the increasing ignorance of the middle classes, with the genuine elements which characterize the holiday’s pagan majesty and long traditions.
As his essay completely ignores the period from which virtually all of the included images were taken, Halloween: Vintage Holiday Graphics would have been a better book without Heller’s contribution.

[tags]halloween party, halloween[/tags]

lies in the thankfully brief and offensively misguided preface essay by Steven Heller, whose questionable credentials for contributing such a piece are nowhere in evidence.

“It is hard to image a more paradoxical day of celebration than one where ghouls, warlocks, and zombies freely haunt the populace to their cold heart’s content an entire day dedicated to torment,” Heller begins, before immediately and awkwardly backtracking, though he continues to show little understanding of the nature of the holiday.

Vintage Holiday Graphics 2005 offers one of the best collections of Olde Halloween images yet available. Drawing material from postcards, paper decorations, magazines, advertisements, package labels, private period photographs, sheet music, masks, costumes, party favors, and other varied sources, the book offers almost two hundred pages of visionary iconography, that, for many, will definitely represent the very nature of the holiday itself.

Among the more archetypal images: a vegetable man, three devils, and a caped witch enjoy a circular dance beneath an enormous watchful owl perched on a half moon; an androgynous child and black cat peering into a jack o’ lantern as a transparent, green skinned witch breezes by unseen overhead; and, appearing like the eternal outsider, a red skirted witch gazes unnoticed through a window at a child’s party, while a black cat, an owl, and an anthropomorphic moon observe her in turn.

Traditional images of ghosts, scarecrows, bats, fairies, pumpkins, and human tricksters in colors of orange, black, white, and green predominate, though some of the images were clearly culled from the Fifties and Sixties, and thus the occasional helmeted spaceman or antenned robot appears. There is a photograph of an adult blandly costumed as John F. Kennedy, another of a boy outlandishly dressed as television dolphin star Flipper, and, from an earlier era, bizarrely costumed manifestations of Mickey and Minnie Mouse courting one another out of doors.