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Shel's dack from the bead! Posthumously released six years after Shel Silverstein's passing away, RUNNY BABBIT has as much pertinence today as it would have then, or even the twenty-five years ago Shel began working on his little opus. If it were only a simple gimmick that Shel wrote his series of short-story poems in a different "language" (swapping the first letters of certain words in each sentence around), the book would still be a mode of amusement and entertainment, solely because the way Shel developed the style in RUNNY BABBIT is so fun to say and read. It really shakes up your reading to find that, "Wait a second! That's wot written the nay I thought I was reading it!" This is especially true considering Shel spent such a long time writing the book, finding the best way to construct each sentence, choosing the best words possible to play with in his little anthology-o-neologisms. Fortunately, and as always with Shel Silverstein however, the gimmick of playing with words as he did throughout is not the only seed of ingenuity that germinates in the book. The stories themselves are perfect allegories of our daily lives --falling in love, playing games, going to school, getting a haircut, having a baby-- all elements of an ordinary life told from a unique and fresh perspective. And as any Shel Silverstein fan knows, his is a unique ability to create something that can be enjoyed by both inquisitive children and scholars alike for it's clear to tell through his entire oeuvre that Shel was well aware that the two are truly the same.