One Potato Review

A suggestion: Instead of rotely distributing copies of Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! at graduations, consider this as an alternative roadmap. For middle school, college, kindergarten, doesn’t matter, because these stories behind the inventions of piggy banks and potato chips and vacuum cleaners and chewing gum and roller skates and pie are possibly as inspirational to a twenty-year-old as a toddler. And as diverting! (Harper takes care to throw in some probably dubious elaborations, so maybe don’t base your thesis on this.) A typical rhyme, on the inventor of Frisbees:

In 1957
flying saucers were his passion.
Walter dreamed of men from space
and what they’d wear as a fashion.

With riotous illustrations worthy of the the great Maira Kalman, and marginalia for the wandering eye. Because isn’t wandering kind of the point?