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Children's Books - It's a Book - By Lane Smith - NYTimes.com Page 2 of 2 <br />page spread of the jackass simply reading is the key moment in the story, and one of the <br />nicest sequences in recent picture books. <br />For in trying to make the case for books to our kids, exactly the case we want to make is <br />not that they can compete with the virtues of computer or screens, but that they do <br />something else: that they allow for a soulfulness the screens, with their jumpy <br />impersonality, cannot duplicate — any more than the movies can duplicate the intimate <br />intensity of theater, or than the computer can reproduce the shared- hearth -in- living- <br />room experience of television that we now, ironically, recall nostalgically. ( "Would you <br />please get off your computer and come and watch television with the rest of the family," <br />I've found myself calling out to my own plugged -in children.) <br />The moral of Smith's book is the right one: not that screens are bad and books are good, <br />but that what books do depends on the totality of what they are — their turning pages, <br />their sturdy self - sufficiency, above all the way they invite a child to withdraw from this <br />world into a world alongside ours in an activity at once mentally strenuous and <br />physically still. <br />The only flaw this gentle and pointed book contains, in truth, is a too -easy joke on the <br />last page at the expense of the converted burro. But one can glide by the false note, or at <br />least talk it over as it's read — after all, it's a book. <br />Adam Gopnik is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of a new book, "The Steps <br />Across the Water." <br />hitp: / /www.nytimes.com/ 2010 /10 /I7/books/ review /Gopnik- t.html? r= I &pagewanted =print 7/10/2012 <br />