POOH AND THE PHILOSOPHERS

Pooh And The Philosophers ($17.99; June 1996; 214 pp.; 0-525-45520-5): Contending that Pooh, all his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, is in fact a Bear of Great Brain Indeed, Williams drives an already frayed conceit deeply, deeply into the ground, proposing Pythagorean precepts that presage Poohvian pronouncements, spinning more parallels from Spinoza, digging up Heideggerian dogma, giving new meaning to ``exegesis'' by pointing out all the x's in the ``expotition'' passage, etc. Adorned by the subtitle ``In Which It Is Shown That All of Western Philosophy Is Merely a Preamble to Winnie-the-Pooh,'' and plainly intended to be a painless primer of the major western schools of philosophy, this tedious, undiverting analysis doesn't come close to Benjamin Hoff's The Tao of Pooh (1982), not to mention its great progenitor, Frederick C. Crew's The Pooh Perplex (1962). Enough, already. (Humor/novelty. 12+)