Topsy Turvy World

A fantastical illustrated book where mice chase cats, penguins live in the jungle, cars fly and aeroplanes float!

To the first Europeans who came to Australia, everything seemed topsy turvy. Christmas was in the summer and trees shed their bark but not their leaves. And the animals were bizarre. There was a bird that laughed like a donkey and a type of greyhound that bound along on its hind legs like a hare. There was an animal in Tasmania whose nocturnal screeches sounded like the devil and a river creature that had a duck's bill at one end and a beaver's tail at the other. The Europeans had never seen anything like these animals before and gave them names similar to those of the European creatures they already knew. They drew and painted odd pictures of them, showing they did not understand the animals' habits. In one illustration, a wombat is standing on its back legs and in another a Tasmanian tiger is wrestling with a platypus of the same size.

No musical partnership has enjoyed greater success during its time span than that of Gilbert and Sullivan in the later 19th century. No fewer than a dozen Savoy operas are still regularly performed. The operas present audiences with splendidly rich and satirical evocations of Victorian England and its society: the prime subject matter of this book!

In the tradition of Thomas Demand, acclaimed German photographer Frank Kunert (born 1963) spends weeks constructing highly detailed, convincingly realistic models, then photographs them to exacting technical standards to create vibrant images rife with subtle visual puns. Far from being simply satirical or charming, Kunert's miniatures often contain disquieting non-sequiturs: for example, an image of a multistory apartment-building interior seems to exude a kind of petit-bourgeois tristesse with its carpeted balcony railings, a lone flower box and deck chair, but on closer inspection the doors lead nowhere and the balconies cannot be accessed. This volume, first published in 2008 and long out of print, reveals Kunert's enigmatic world.

A little boy describes his favorite pretend place called Topsy-Turvy Town, where he shares his bath with a robot and it rains broccoli.

This book brings into sharp relief the way in which gender, race, slavery, and status shaped the lives of children in the American South before, during, and after the Civil War. She argues that the identities children developed in the antebellum era shaped their responses to the upheavals of the war years and their lives after the war's conclusion.

This book offers support and practical tools to help parents prepare for and support the toddler's transition between the familiar environment of their biological parent's home or foster home to a new and unfamiliar one, and considers the issues that arise at different developmental stages.