“I think that book has done more damage to fragile young psyches than any other kids’ book in the last 50 years. “I refuse to read it to my kids or my friends’ kids,” he wrote in an email. After a brief consultation with the dinosaur expert Bob Strauss about that analogy, Strauss, without prompting, declared his disgust for the book. The boy uses the tree as a plaything, lives off her like a parasite, and then, when she’s a shell of her former self and no longer serves any real purpose, he sits on her - which makes her happy? (“That book is the epitome of male privilege,” a friend groused.)Īs for the argument that “The Giving Tree” is somehow a commentary on the ways humans ravage the environment, I mean, maybe? The tree of Silverstein’s imagination, unlike most other trees felled by humans, suffers mightily but never dies, left to live out her years as a five-fingered stump, abandoned in the grass like the orphaned foot of a gentle sauropod.

To those who defend it as a warts-and-all parable lamenting man’s inhumanity to man - or, perhaps, man’s inhumanity to woman - I’d say that I’m not so sure Silverstein, who dedicated the book to a former girlfriend, “Nicky,” was writing an indictment of what men assume they can get way with. Of course, maybe we’re just projecting, but to those who would say that Silverstein’s book is a moving, sentimental depiction of the unyielding love of a parent for a child, I’d say, Learn better parenting skills. (I’m not even going to get into the biblical implications of Silverstein’s decision to make the tree of the book’s title apple-bearing.) “And the tree was happy,” reads the last line of the 52-page story, a sentiment repeated by Silverstein so many times that it sends some, like me, into paroxysms of reflexive indignation. “The Nazis would have loved it,” one man raged, proving that everything up to and including beloved children’s picture books will eventually fall prey to Godwin’s Law - that as an online discussion grows, so does the likelihood that someone or something will be compared to a Nazi.įor those who need a recap: Boy meets adoring, obliging apple tree and eventually, through a combination of utter impotence and blatant manipulation, makes off with her branches, her trunk and, of course, the literal fruits of her labor.

“One star or five, there is no middle ground,” declared another. A passionate and very vocal minority of reviewers on sites like Amazon and Goodreads seems to find the story an affront not just to literature but to humanity itself. A 2010 post about “The Giving Tree” in this paper’s MotherLode blog, “Children’s Books You (Might) Hate,” attracted more than 300 comments.

The giving tree picture