Tag Archives: Book Review

Book Review of Pete Seeger’s “Story Telling Book”

One of the first things I did when I decided to publish my book was acquire a bunch of books about writing and publishing.  In this frenzy, I picked up Pete Seeger’s “Story Telling Book” composed by Pete Seeger & Paul Dubois Jacobs.  It is a strange book.  I thought it would be about the craft of story telling.  Instead, it is  a book of stories to tell to children.  The bulk of the book is short stories, mostly already known, suitable for children with endnotes about how to make the story more compelling or creative (use scary voices, swap “boy” for “girl”).  Fairly frequently the story is modified from the original to emphasize values such as working together.

The book is divided in 6 sections.

Stories from my father- Family history type stories with tips on how to exaggerate the details to make them more compelling and stories that Pete Seeger’s father told him when he was a child.

New versions of old stories- retellings and modifications of old stories such as stories from the bible or fairy tales like “stone soup”

Stories from Sounds, Rounds, and lullabyes-  Stories that fill in the details about events described in songs.

Stories from American History-  This has both more family history stories and stories about legendary people’s lives

A few of my own stories- The only fully original stories in the book.  There is a lot of magical elements in both stories from my father and this section- talking lightbulbs and telephone lines for example.  They struck me as fairly formulaic, but I  guess that is the point of the book- formulas so you can be a storyteller?  To be fair, I did find the stories compelling enough that I read the book in a single sitting.  This may have made the formulas more obvious…

Story Beginnings- The first bit of a story- the rest of the story is left up to the reader.  Some are original (to Seeger or his father) while some are well-known (Goldilocks).

Okay, first, clearly this book is of no use to me and my quest to publish my book.  It has 8 fairly glowing reviews on Amazon from parents who have retold the stories to their children to much acclaim.  If you are looking to freshen up story hour, this might be the book for you.  If you already have stories bursting out of your head, and regularly use your “monster voice”  or “princess voice” as the story requires, you can probably safely pass on this one.