In this book about the kindness of children, witnessed by Paley in classrooms from a remote rural community on Lake Superior to London, she captures the urgency and precision in the stories they tell in her program...Paley tells these stories to her 97-year-old mother, who likens them to Hasidic storytelling, in which the author recounts stories of holy men doing mitzvoth or good deeds. "Children are eager," Paley writes, "to take part in another's stories so that they may fill in the empty spaces." Paley is a fine writer who has learned in her life of observation how to let the subject drive the story and how to be a vulnerable player as well. It's hard to live up to the sheer nobility of children, but Paley is its scholar.

Paley's method is to weave intimate stories about her story-filled classroom. The vignettes that result are ideally suited to her subject. Her classroom scenes, by capturing with precision the 3-foot-high child's-eye view, bring down to earth what risks sounding like a romantically sweeping credo about salvation through narration. Actual kindergartners swapping tales makes for more interesting and credible confusion than that. In Paley's pages, the familiar chatter of childhood becomes a quilt, scrappy but well sewn together, of journeys into a world that bewilders but also beckons children to join it...In The Kindness of Children, Paley...showcases a collection of...polished gems about children's "spontaneous acts of goodness," which she has gathered and retold as she goes about her emeritus career of lecturing and visiting schools. The tales in themselves are often quite moving--the paraplegic boy radiant at being included in a pretend game of "store"; the tough boy who whispers saving advice to a child on the brink of collapse; the girl who is suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of generosity on a crowded bus.

Vivian Paley, an author and former kindergarten teacher whose latest book, The Kindness of Children, is an exploration of children's impulsive goodness, contends that although each child comes into the world with an instinct for kindness, it is a lesson that must be reinforced at every turn.

Paley, the author of numerous popular books and the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, tells stories about children that will make you see kids in a new light. This book is filled with evidence of the surprising goodness of little boys and girls. A delightful read.

Vivian Gussin Paley's The Kindness of Children is the kind of book that once occupied a place on student teachers' shelves, where now you find only textbooks about the mechanics of the craft. It starts with an encounter in a London nursery between the children and a visiting child who has a severe disability. They display astonishing kindness, not to say inventiveness, in the way they include him in their play. Through the rest of the book the author tells how she went from town to town in Britain and the US, telling the story and receiving a host of interesting and moving reactions. This is one for half-term, a recharger of spiritual batteries.

This book will appeal to those who have followed Paley's writing throughout the years, and to teachers and professionals who work with young children. It reveals the important ways in which children can have an impact on our lives. It is also an important reminder, to all of us, of the power of mitzvot, good deeds, and the wonderful things that can happen with an act of kindness.

Whether she's reflecting on a rural Michigan boy who pretends for an entire year to be a truck or talking with her mother, who delights in making a new friend at the retirement home, Paley is a thoughtful reporter and commentator on human interaction and its inevitable sidekick, emotional growth.

[Paley] is surely one of our best teachers, one who has never stopped learning.

In this enchanting and edifying book, [Paley] revels in what she has seen happen in schools when she has given children the chance to make up stories and have their classmates dramatize them. Paley observes: "these spontaneous storytellers create little homes for one another where everyone can imagine playing a role and no one is left out." Using a variety of the children's tales as examples, the author celebrates the ability of kids to create moments of happiness and hopefulness for each other.

[The Kindness of Children] is a subtle, psychologically and imaginatively rich guide to one of the important ways in which children learn how to be more fully human: namely, kindness. Paley, a former kindergarten teacher, a MacArthur Award recipient, and the prolific author of many books about children and education, describes how very young students transform themselves and one another by taking in, narrating, and sometimes dramatically acting out tales of kindness and other acts of goodness.

This is an extraordinarily suggestive book, written for all of us who are interested in children and their educational lives. The author is an American treasure.