Interesting out of print book online

[Daddymem]

The Jack of All Trades: Fair weather ideas

Lots of things to make some cabins and even an underground fort.

[Amanda_931]

I love Dan Beard.

Grew up on him and Ernest Thompson Seton.  

which reminds me I need to go look up the latter's essay(s) on crows. promised it months ago to a computerless friend.

Here's (one of?) them.  He claimed that crows had a large vocabulary, for a bird--nearly thirty words, IIRC.  This is the story of the leader of a flock.  With a bunch of the words.

http://www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=seton&book=wild&story=silverspot

[Amanda_931]

Woman who's working for me right now has a handful of, ahem, challenges.  Traumatic brain injury when she was in high school, although between some eye problems and what sounded like it might have been pretty haphazard home schooling, apparently she hated reading before.

So I keep trying to push her into reading--recipes because we cook ourselves lunch, etc.  After a week or so I printed out the story of old Silverspot for her, and after another week or so she picked it up.  And was totally hooked.  Read it in one sitting.

It is a children's story, but not one that we'd probably recognize today.  But she was delighted to be exposed to, if not learn, the crow's language, and understand that they really could tell the difference between an umbrella and a gun.

(as in, anybody--themselves or with kids who would like it--who thinks crows are wonderful, go looking at Wild Animals I Have Known in the previous post.  My guess is that there's a fair amount of that kind of thing there.