Beautiful and wonderful. Works of genius by a man who freed himself enough that he could give himself up to that genius instead of trying to make sure that it came out perfectly. As pleasing as his other works are, none I've read can match the joy, humor, simplicity, and odd truth of these. Like children's literature should be, these stories never lose their humor or punch. Despite some redundancy with actual myths and some cases of artificially lowering complexity for children and hence growing...

All these tales are like Aesop's fables about how various animals got their characteristic features. They are beautiful short tales - most likely derived from folk legends that Kipling heard during his time in Africa and India - but still full of humour and subtle wisdom. Unlike Kim, his pro-empire attitude does not really pollute the innocent atmosphere of these wonderful stories.

They always say: "Never give a child a book you won't read for yourself" and I agree. I will be reviewing as long as I go through this book, so here we are: >> How the Camel Got his Hump? A dreadful tale about a camel who is lazy that as a result, a genie makes humps for the camel, end of story. This is dreadful for a number of reasons:1- The camel has those humps which are a miracle in its essence. The camels use it to feed and nourish because they are meant to live in harsh environments of sc...

The Just So StoriesI was introduced to these stories at a age so early that I cannot remember when.Later I would re-read these stories along with the Jungle Book stories, which made Kipling famous."How the Elephant got his truck" is his best. I laughed when the Elephant's Child asked his relatives what the crocodile has for dinner and got spanked by them.However I was worried when he actually met the crocodile, who bit his nose and began pulling him into the river.The Just So Stories are good to...

Just So Stories were my favorite bedtime stories. . . I like origin stories, where things started, why they are the way they are. . . .when my Christian parents made sure to replace these stories with the bible version of where these animals came from, I was dismayed. I liked Mr. Kipling's reasons rather than the overall "God made 'em", no further detail provided on the other side. In my secret heart of hearts I still hold tighter to Mr. K. I get that his world view is out of order now, and not

I've got a vague memory reading these short stories as a kid, a quick Google search also revealed an early 90's BBC animated series which looked familiar and probably the reason for owning thr book.Out of the 12 stories in the collection, my favourites were the ones that I had the strongest recollections.Like how the workshy Camel got his hump and a baby Elephant developt a trunk.These stories are so quirky and memorable!Coincidentally the strongest stories are in the first half of the collectio...

A breezy and heart-lightening collection of inventive language and well-incorporated illustrations. Kipling is great at poking fun at logic and descriptions by twisting the first in a credibly juvenile fashion and blowing the latter out of proportion both in terms of diction and repetition. The glued-on attributes such as "more-than-oriental-splendour" and "infinite-resource-and-sagacity" were simply hysterical.The raw material of Kipling's stories is inventive and endearing, and his execution i...

This was an adorably sweet collection of stories, aimed at younger readers and all centring around the themes of animals. Whilst not scientifically correct in the least, this offered the reader a series of fun anecdotes about how various different animals got their defining features, such as a leopard and his spots and an elephant with his trunk.My main source of enjoyment with this book came from its amusing usage of language. Alliterative terms, onomatopoeic phrases, odd pairings of words, and...

Loved all the stories, but my personal favorite was about Elephant's Child. Sometimes 'satiable curiosity doesn't kill you; it gets you a very practical appendage with which you can spank your bossy Relatives and hove them into a wasp's nest. And let's face it, O Best Beloved, we've all had that impulse.

Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, originally published in 1902, are perennial favourites, and can be read by adults and children alike. They are known as "pourquoi" stories; in this case fantasies about the origin of individual wild animals who live in different countries. The seed of the idea lies in the story "How Fear Came," within Rudyard Kipling's "Second Jungle Book" of 1895, when Mowgli hears the story of how the tiger got his stripes. It is possible this gave the author the idea for a w...

The book that made me fall in love with storytelling. I still have my mother's hardbound edition, with marvelous color plates, published in the 20s. Kipling may have been a romantic apologist for the British Empire, but the man knew how to weave a spell in children's stories, and he can be quite playful and inventive with language. Just read the first line of any number of stories and you'll immediately understand his timeless appeal. My favorites are from The Cat that Walked by Himself -- "Here...

160th book of 2020.Reading books at one point in our lives will always trigger a different feeling to reading it in another. I often wonder how many books I would despise, or love, if only I had read them a year later, or earlier, or in another country, or right at home. In a sense, the Goodreads 5-star system is flawed completely, because there is too much to take into account. I think even discussing a book can take too long: to discuss the writing, the book's merit, the writer, where we were,...

I am a Kipling fan. There, I said it. Today it is not a good thing to say that, but I don't care. Revisionists be damned.However, I just couldn't get into the stories here, which really aren't all that bad. They are clever and fun, to be certain. In particular, I loved How The Leopard Got His Spots and The Beginning Of The Armadillos. True to life was The Elephant's Child, reminding me of the baby elephants I always see at the zoos, endlessly driving their parents insane with their crazy antics....

What an infuriating book. I don't know what infuriates me more: that Kipling was a racist imperialist colonizer who believed firmly in white superiority and conveyed that in every word of these stories; or that Kipling is such a marvelous writer of the English language.Kipling the colonizer, imperialist, racist, supremicist, had no trouble at all mugging the oral traditions of the peoples his people colonized to tell his "Just So Stories" to his Best Beloved. No trouble at all mimicking their vo...

These stories were funny, imaginative, and well written. I have read several reviews that talk about Kipling being Imperialistic, condescending, and a host of other distasteful names. But here's the deal...he wrote these tales in different times and they were written for his children. I think such judgments might be slightly anachronistic; however, I do think Kipling says some things that are grating to our modern ears and sentiments. I wasn't getting the whole "white man's burden" vibe that som...

How The Kipling Got His ReputationOnce upon a time, Best Beloved, when the world was middle-aged and good Queen Victoria sat on the throne, there was a Kipling. And even though he constantly had to carry around a White Man's Burden (an object, by the way, which he had invented himself, and very proud he was of it too), he was as happy as the day is long. And he would often stop for a moment, and sing a little song he'd written, which beganMamma Pajama rolled out of bed and ran to the po-lice sta...

It was ten years ago when I first read "Just So Stories" out of sheer boredom in my college years in the computer room of my college on the most unlikely place of all - Wikisource. The library had been reserved for some students for an examination and I could no go there and borrow the edition that lay in its old shelves. When I was finally able to go there to try my luck at borrowing it, my mind full of amusing and arresting scenes of how rhinoceroses rubbed their itching bodies to get rid of t...

OK, he's a racist blackguard, but Kipling does write beautifully. This was his first book I read in the original and I loved every bit of it - the stories and the pictures. Since I was too young to understand the latent racism (and there's so much of it in here, apparently) when I read it, and I have not reread it since, I will rate it based on my original reading experience - five golden stars.

I think I enjoyed this book more than any other works by Kipling. The children's short stories were light, fun, imaginative, and entertaining. There was also a poem associated with each story - I liked these as well. Simple rhymes and tempos. Good stuff. There were, of course, moments where I went "so at the time this was considered appropriate for children, huh?". For instance, there was a story about a child elephant that asks his relatives innocent questions, and each beats him up hard instea...