ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN

Brief essays dripping with sentiment, stuffed with country wisdom. A retired Unitarian minister, Fulghum came to national attention when his title essay became a grass-roots favorite read on radio by Paul Harvey and Larry King and reprinted in ""Dear Abby"" and Reader's Digest. ""Kindergarten"" is apple-pie, clean-sheet inspiration: ""Share everything. Play fair. Don't hit people. . ."" and so on. Here, Fulghum delivers dozens more of his pithy heartwarming essays. Topics include a spider crawling up a rain sprout; a ""gummy lump"" (a shoe box filled with childhood momentoes: ""It makes your world go round and the ride worth the trouble""); the joy of Crayolas (""Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A Beauty Bomb""); a kids' game called Sardines (""I think old God is a Sardine player. And will be found the same way everybody gets found in Sardines--by the sound of laughter of those heaped together at the end""); and what he really wants for Christmas (""I want my childhood back""). He likes to write about people he meets or reads about: Larry Walter (""my hero""), who floated above L.A. in an aluminum lawn-chair airborne by 45 helium balloons; a deaf child named Donny who rakes lawns; cobbler Elias Schwartz, who believes that ""anything not worth doing is worth not doing well."" Fulghum delights in his subjects, celebrating them while using them as springboards for simple (some would say cornball) insights into life (""You may never have proof of your importance, but you are more important than you think""). A treasure for those (a) who rejoice in homilies and/or (b) who swear by newspaper advice columns and/or (c) have a high sugar tolerance. Diabetics and cynics, beware.