Find him on Twitter: This article previously appeared in The Coffeelicious on Medium.From Shel Silverstein, New York Times bestselling author of Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic, comes a poignant picture book about love and acceptance, cherished for over fifty years. He previously practiced securities and commercial litigation in New York City.

Our days of wholeness lie not in the past, but in the future: in our far-off country.Īnthony Ford is the co-founder of Move On Pluto and co-creator of interactive children’s book app Max & Meredith: The Search for Percival. We’re too old to play, and the tree we remember is gone. In concert, the act of reading and the narrative itself evoke the unspeakable loss and longing time has wrought since we first read about the tree who loved a little boy. We now read the book to our children, as was read to us before we knew the loss age brings, back when the story was about nothing more than a tree’s tender love. The book was a childhood gift to me from our neighbors of long ago, who we affectionately called “aunt” and “uncle.” (My mother apparently placed the book in my home at some point.) The inscription stirred distant memories of reading the book in my childhood bedroom.Īnd now the crux of it: for those of us who fondly remember reading The Giving Tree as a child, that memory itself stirs our longing. I wrote at the outset I didn’t know where our copy of The Giving Tree came from, but I actually learned upon cracking open the book: Here’s what’s fascinating: the book deeply moves adults regardless of whether they view it as extolling the tree’s unconditional love or lamenting the tree’s self-destructive love. Readers have debated the book’s meaning since its publication in 1964, with the primary disagreement captured by the title of a NY Times Sunday Book Review from 2014: ‘The Giving Tree’: Tender Story of Unconditional Love or Disturbing Tale of Selfishness? Variously interpreted as a picture of parental love, divine love, abusive relationships, or even environmental rapacity, the book sharply divides readers.

By the end, the tree is a stump, but the boy - now a tired old man - needs nothing more than a quiet place to rest, so he sits on the tree and she is happy. So the tree gives the boy her apples to sell, her branches to build a house, and her trunk to make a boat. They play together happily every day, but the boy grows up and pursues the trappings of adulthood: money, a house, a family, travel. On its face, the story is about a tree’s sacrificial love for a boy.

The giving tree book