THE LAST FREE BIRD
By
A lament for the last free bird that looks nothing like but parallels Thurber's paean to The Last Flower. In page after page of immediately evocative watercolors set off by a compact but poetic running text, the wide-ranging world of birds diminishes (""people changed the land/and built and paved and dumped"") until no place is left to feed and drink, to rest and breed. Like the Thurber, this is an abstraction made graphic, but too remote from the concerns of children to engage their interest -- one bird will do it, Everybird won't.