From the time that Roger Sale's interpretive history Seattle Past to Present was published in 1976 he has often served as an unofficial guide for friends and visitors to Seattle, and has also been asked by those who run professional tours for advice on how to view Seattle with fresh eyes. In Seeking Seattle he invites the reader to join him in walking tours of the city in a collaborative process of looking, asking, and forming opinions and judgments.

The book starts near where Seattle itself started and works out to the city limits in layers. In the first walk, the Pioneer Square...

Roger Sale invites us to discover anew some of the great works of children's literature, works that have been read and loved but seldom given the benefit of serious literary assessment. It takes a critic of special gifts--receptiveness, discrimination, clarity of perception, independence of judgment--to discuss these books as illuminatingly as Sale does.

This is not a survey but a very personal book: Sale writes about stories and books with which he feels an imaginative sympathy. As it happens, they include a great many of the classic children's texts, works as disparate as "Beauty...