The pushcart war
The outbreak of a war between truck drivers and pushcart peddlers brings the mounting problems of traffic to the attention of both the city of New York and the world.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
5mentions
5people
2018–2026years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Never attracted me and the aesthetics of the city and its surrounding immediate environment put me off. (I would still like to visit other parts of New York state though.) There's a weirdness to the city, at least how I see it from afar and, to be fair, I'm sure in a somewhat distorted manner through media. Movies and TV shows set there put me off (even Seinfeld which I enjoy). Only The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill and The Chosen by Chaim Potok have shown me some charm in the place, and the music of New York native Suzanne Vega.
I appreciate that it's an important city, has many cultural attractions and many people love the place. But for me it's too big, too chaotic and, as I say above, too weird, and I would prefer to stay away from it entirely.
- (other readers: sorry, I know this post is going to be a bit obnoxiously long, but I didn't want to put it on a pastebin or some other external service and potentially have it disappear if someone wanted to reference it in the future. If you're not interested please feel free to collapse this!)
I actually asked my mom to compile a list of books she could remember, because a friend had kids and was getting to the age where they were starting to read too. Here's what she came up with (note, no particular order of difficulty or maturity here):
My Father’s dragon series
Where the sidewalk ends, Shel Silverstein
A pizza the size of the Sun
Choose your own adventure books
The Great Brain
The Boxcar Children series
Captain Underpants
Roald Dahl books: The BFG, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, The Twits, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory/The Great Glass Elevator (not as good)
My Side of the Mountain
No More Dead Dogs
The Secret Garden
Bridge to Terabithia (Deals with death, a little older)
The Lion, the witch, and the wardrobe
Across five Aprils (civil war historical fiction, older)
The Broken Blade (Voyageur) & Sequel
Island of the blue dolphins
The witch of blackbird pond
Johnny Tremaine (a bit older)
The sign of the Beaver
Charlotte’s Web
Because of Winn Dixie
Tuck Everlasting (sad at end)
Ruby Holler
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Treasure Island
The Pushcart War
Maniac Magee
Rascal
Frindle
Hatchet (Gary Paulsen)
Mr. Popper’s Penguins (young)
Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing (Juy Blume)
Pippi Longstocking
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (young)
A Wrinkle in Time
Moccasin Trail
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
From the Mixed Up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
The Egypt Game
The Phantom Tollbooth (young)
Holes (little older)
Sideways Stories from Wayside School (young)
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Homer Price (easy reading)
The Indian in the Cupboard
Misty of Chincoteague (series)
Aesop’s Fables (young)
The Eye, the Ear, and the Arm
Redwall series
Watership Down
(I'll throw in the Discworld series too for kids that are getting a bit older! It's probably very readable for, say, an advanced 5th grader. I was tearing through all the redwall books and the Golden Compass series at that point and Discworld is probably comparable. Golden Compass wasn't finished then and The Amber Spyglass ended up being kind of a disappointment. I know I was reading Discworld by 7th grade for sure.)
- You might enjoy The Pushcart War, about this very idea! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/219557.The_Pushcart_War
- Haha, yeah, I can understand that.
The good news is that the early reader books tend to be very short - 15-30 pages of very large type, and lots of illustrations. < 5000 words, and many < 1000 words.
I don't know a ton of them because I personally sort of skipped straight from picture books to middle grade books. The one series I can remember is called "Frog and Toad". If you have access to a library (physical or digital) with English language titles, you may be able to find more under the "Early Reader" classification.
Middle grade fiction can really be fun for an adult. There are tons of options depending on what sort of stories you like. A few ideas and favorites:
- The Goosebumps series is popular.
- There are a lot of middle grade mystery series like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew
- A few of my personal favorites from childhood: The Pushcart War; Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH; A Wrinkle in Time; The Phantom Tollbooth; the Chronicles of Narnia (warning: heavy Christian symbolism); Bunnicula; Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle; Mr. Popper's Penguins; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; anything by Roald Dahl
- Some "classics" can be considered middle grade (warning: some of these reflect racist and colonialist 19th and early 20thC patterns of thought): Robinson Crusoe; Peter Pan; the Jungle Book; Alice in Wonderland; Black Beauty (not racist, it's about a horse); Dr. Doolittle; Just So Stories
- The Harry Potter series starts off at an advanced middle grade reading level and gradually increases to a young adult reading level
- Another thing that might be fun would be books of myths from various cultures. I remember reading a big book of Norse myths and another of Greek myths around age 8-9. You could probably start with a collection from a culture you're already familiar with, which could assist with understanding.
Edited to add: your written English is excellent!
- "Is Revenue Model More Important than Culture?" is a very interesting read, I read it twice, once yesterday, once again today while taking notes about it. The "dominant term rule" is concept that is similar to what you are describing Eric with the concept "financial gravity". Which is is similar to the [[large object theory of history]], explained on the podcast episode [[The War on Cars: Tony Kushner on The Pushcart War]]: >[[large object theory of history]] is that all human misery is the product, not of some sort of general malevolence, equally distributed among the human population, but located among certain people who feel that they have to basically get into a gigantic truck and run over pushcart peddlers in order to be safe and secure in this world.
