Elmer and Wilbur (Elmer eBooks)

Reward Yourself

More titles may be available to you. Sign in to see the full collection.

1. See a Problem?.
2. Elmer and the Race - NC Kids Digital Library - OverDrive.
3. La fabrique de crimes (French Edition).
4. What is Kobo Super Points?!
5. ;
6. Expériences dintervention psychosociale en contexte de violence conjugale (French Edition)?

The young elephants want to have a race to prove who is fastest, so Elmer and Wilbur organize a course. With each racer decorated a different color, they set off around the course and discover things about themselves—Blue is first, Orange is second, White is kind, Pink and Violet are funny, and Yellow is a cheat. Luckily Yellow also learns he is very good at saying sorry, so each young elephant gets a medal from Elmer.

Andersen Press Kindle Book Release date: Kindle Book Release date: Availability can change throughout the month based on the library's budget. You can still place a hold on the title, and your hold will be automatically filled as soon as the title is available again. The OverDrive Read format of this ebook has professional narration that plays while you read in your browser. You've reached the maximum number of titles you can currently recommend for purchase.

• Join Kobo & start eReading today;
• Elmer and Wilbur by David McKee - Penguin Books Australia!
• Elmer and the Race?

Your session has expired. Please sign in again so you can continue to borrow titles and access your Loans, Wish list, and Holds pages. If you're still having trouble, follow these steps to sign in.



• Browse menu!
• Surviving Henry: Adventures in Loving a Canine Catastrophe.
• Customers who bought this item also bought.
• Elmer and Wilbur.

But Elmer, after meeting the hippos, decides not to banish them. Instead he and cousin Wilbur plan to remove the rocks that are damming the river. We keep saying, in Britain and in France, there's not enough room. But instead of saying no we should be asking why they are here. Again, the storyline has personal resonance for McKee. His second wife, Bakhta, a French-Algerian art dealer, he says, has experienced racial prejudice because of the colour of her skin. Lest this article seem a love-in for David McKee's work, let's remember the drubbing Polly Toynbee of this newspaper gave his book, Denver.

Elmer and Rose

In the book, Denver is a rich man who gives away his money generously and is beloved by his community — until a suspicious stranger arrives in town asking why everyone can't share more equally. Denver shares out the money equally but the locals squander it. Then, having got the hump, Denver sets up in another town, successfully takes up painting, and dispenses largesse there. The people of the original town are rueful.



If he comes your way, don't listen to him. Toynbee, whose granddaughter had borrowed Denver from the library, excoriated this anti-socialist allegory as "Ayn Rand for baby beginners, trickle-down economics for trustafarian toddlers, a nursery Hayek for every little Conservative. McKee is unrepentant and says this story was inspired by his opposition to France's wealth tax, and by his childhood sense that the lord of the manor, dispensing largesse to a grateful local population, could be a good thing: He was raised in Tavistock, Devon, by parents who met when they were His mother was working, "for the lady of the manor and he was the gardener's boy".

What does he remember of them?

Elmer and Rose by David McKee

My mother was a great storyteller and I had a big family of uncles and aunts who were great storytellers too. Tavistock was a town full of ghosts and stories about them, and stories about the haunted parts of Dartmoor were always being told. It was a matter of just being receptive to what was in the air. The extended McKee family also inspired some of the characters in the Elmer books — his ventriloquist of an uncle, Wilbur, becomes Elmer's ventriloquist of a cousin of the same name, while Aunt Zelda in the books echoes something of his mother.

Nowadays, though, Elmer stories are more likely to be inspired by his three children and three grandchildren.

Follow the Author

We call him Blakey Blue Blue so I called the monster [whom Elmer finds sobbing at the outset because of his alienatingly terrifying roar] Bloo Bloo. As a boy, Aesop's Fables and parables from the Bible were David's favourite reading. People have said that I write modern fables and the reason I do that, I think, is because the attitude of my parents was very moral.

They showed me to be conscious of what you have got, but not to be beholden to your possessions. At Plymouth College of Art, where he enrolled in , McKee's first love was painting, but he couldn't see how to make it pay, so he started sending cartoons to newspapers.

But it was Mr Benn that made him famous. For television viewers of a certain age mine for example , Mr Benn is apt to give one a Proustian rush, thanks to the minute adventures that McKee made for the BBC in the early s. Each week the bowler-hatted hero would enter a mysterious fancy dress shop modelled, McKee says, on one in Plymouth that he passed each day on his way to college and a mysterious fez-wearing proprietor would offer Mr Benn a costume.

Our hero would retreat into the changing room, and find himself in an adventurous location dressed for the part the changing room was to Mr Benn what the wardrobe was to the Narnia stories.