How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin

by Rudyard Kipling

Just So Stories (3)

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Relates how the rhinoceros's lack of manners resulted in his baggy skin and bad temper.

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I still remember "He who takes cakes/The Parsee man bakes/Makes dreadful mistakes. This was not my favorite Just So Story, but I did enjoy this version as a child with its lively illustrations. Thinking about it now, a Parsee was very unlikely to live in the Red Sea, and he would not have been the rather barbaric individual pictured here in a loincloth,
One of the Just So Stories, please review the artwork to be sure you are comfortable with it for your family. There is nudity.

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2,459+ Works 91,024 Members
Kipling, who as a novelist dramatized the ambivalence of the British colonial experience, was born of English parents in Bombay and as a child knew Hindustani better than English. He spent an unhappy period of exile from his parents (and the Indian heat) with a harsh aunt in England, followed by the public schooling that inspired his "Stalky" show more stories. He returned to India at 18 to work on the staff of the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette and rapidly became a prolific writer. His mildly satirical work won him a reputation in England, and he returned there in 1889. Shortly after, his first novel, The Light That Failed (1890) was published, but it was not altogether successful. In the early 1890s, Kipling met and married Caroline Balestier and moved with her to her family's estate in Brattleboro, Vermont. While there he wrote Many Inventions (1893), The Jungle Book (1894-95), and Captains Courageous (1897). He became dissatisfied with life in America, however, and moved back to England, returning to America only when his daughter died of pneumonia. Kipling never again returned to the United States, despite his great popularity there. Short stories form the greater portion of Kipling's work and are of several distinct types. Some of his best are stories of the supernatural, the eerie and unearthly, such as "The Phantom Rickshaw," "The Brushwood Boy," and "They." His tales of gruesome horror include "The Mark of the Beast" and "The Return of Imray." "William the Conqueror" and "The Head of the District" are among his political tales of English rule in India. The "Soldiers Three" group deals with Kipling's three musketeers: an Irishman, a Cockney, and a Yorkshireman. The Anglo-Indian Tales, of social life in Simla, make up the larger part of his first four books. Kipling wrote equally well for children and adults. His best-known children's books are Just So Stories (1902), The Jungle Books (1894-95), and Kim (1901). His short stories, although their understanding of the Indian is often moving, became minor hymns to the glory of Queen Victoria's empire and the civil servants and soldiers who staffed her outposts. Kim, an Irish boy in India who becomes the companion of a Tibetan lama, at length joins the British Secret Service, without, says Wilson, any sense of the betrayal of his friend this actually meant. Nevertheless, Kipling has left a vivid panorama of the India of his day. In 1907, Kipling became England's first Nobel Prize winner in literature and the only nineteenth-century English poet to win the Prize. He won not only on the basis of his short stories, which more closely mirror the ambiguities of the declining Edwardian world than has commonly been recognized, but also on the basis of his tremendous ability as a popular poet. His reputation was first made with Barrack Room Ballads (1892), and in "Recessional" he captured a side of Queen Victoria's final jubilee that no one else dared to address. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Rudyard Kipling has a Legacy Library. Legacy libraries are the personal libraries of famous readers, entered by LibraryThing members from the Legacy Libraries group.

Some Editions

Langley, Jonathan (Illustrator)
Raglin, Tim (Illustrator)
Rayner, Shoo (Illustrator)
Rojankovsky, Feodor (Illustrator)
Thorne, Jenny (Illustrator)
Weisgard, Leonard (Illustrator)

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Common Knowledge

Original publication date
1956
First words
Once upon a time, on an uninhabited island on the shores of the Red Sea, there lived a Parsee from whose hat the rays of the sun were reflected in more-than-oriental splendour.

Classifications

Genre
Children's Books
DDC/MDS
741.5Arts & recreationDrawing & decorative artsDrawingComic books, graphic novels, fotonovelas, cartoons, caricatures, comic strips
LCC
PZ7 .K632 .HLanguage and LiteratureFiction and juvenile belles lettresFiction and juvenile belles lettresJuvenile belles lettres
BISAC

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226
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Reviews
2
Rating
½ (3.67)
Languages
5 — Chinese, English, French, Italian, Russian
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Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
ISBNs
37
ASINs
13