Dear Enemy

I was hesitant to purchase this after seeing a negative review of the kindle version, but after viewing the free sample, I found that the information in that review was incorrect, and I went ahead and purchased it. The formatting is great, and this edition actually includes the author’s original line drawings (hard to find in a kindle version). My only criticism of this book is the social views and attitudes of the main character about eugenics, etc., which can be offensive.

This is a great follow-up to Jean Webster's "Daddy-Long-Legs"! Good historical fiction as to how life of children and grown-ups attitude towards children of those times. When someone says, Times were simpler then" this book makes you realize how far we have come!

This book is definitely not the original book. It's like the original text was scanned and then all formatting was stripped away, then printed on paper. No introduction, table of contents, or anything like that. How can this be printed and sold? I am guessing the copyright is long out of date so it's in the public domain I guess. Really disappointed and I wish I bought a different edition.

Amusing read

Reminded me of reading Dear Daddy Long Legs as a child

...surprisingly modern!To my mind, "Dear Enemy" is a better, more worthwhile book than the one it's a sequel to, "Daddy Long-Legs." Webster is better known for that first book, a story about a girl named Judy, brought up in an orphanage, who's sent to college (based on Vassar, Webster's school) by a mysterious patron, who asks for nothing from her but frequent reports on her progress. It's a cute book, the story told in the heroine's letters to her shadowy benefactor.But "Dear Enemy," another epistolary novel, is better—more fun and more boldly feminist. Judy, now married to a rich man who's who's president of the board of her orphanage, recruits one of her recent classmates as interim superintendent of that asylum, and Sallie, the classmate, accepts the job. She's motivated by friendship and also, she admits, because her family and friends think it's funny to imagine that she—a frivolous and presumably feather-brained society girl—could actually manage such an enterprise. But, as she reminds Judy, she wants her employment to be very temporary. Superintending a hundred orphans, a barely competent staff, a stupid and stuffy board of trustees, all in a hopelessly decrepit building, is not her idea of a good time. She's in a hurry to get back to parties and dances and the attentions of the rising young politician who's courting her. But the permanent replacement is a long time getting there, and Sallie becomes deeply involved in spite of herself.Sallie's adventures are compelling, and her letters about them, peppered frequently with Webster's hilarious drawings, are laugh-out-loud funny. She immediately identifies some of the people she must deal with—a dour Scottish doctor among them—as "enemies." When one of these enemies comes to visit and snoop, she hides in a closet, directing her maid to tell him she's gone for the afternoon. Thereupon the man sits down to wait, leaving her standing in the dark until the maid invites him to witness the bad behavior of one of the orphans, which lures him away.There is in this book remarkably little of the casual classism and racism that a reader almost comes to expect in the popular literature of its day; such as there is reflects Sallie's character (and Webster's character too, no doubt) as her family and education have shaped her. She hires a new cook for the orphanage, a "colored" woman who shares her first name. Sallie feels that this will be confusing, and suggests that the cook change her name. The cook responds by saying she's been Sallie for longer than her employer, so long that she wouldn't recognize anything else, and implies that if anyone ought to change her name, that person should be the young superintendent. Yes, our Sallie reports this response in comic dialect, but she sighs and gives in, agreeing to share the name. It has always seemed to me that even in this brief incident Webster gives the cook respect as a human being, as many popular white writers of that time would not have done. While the relatively—and self-consciously—enlightened readers of our own age will recognize and cringe at this and some of the stereotypes expressed in Sallie's letters, we should remember that Webster was writing, a century ago, for her contemporaries and was, in fact, enlightening them.At the heart of "Dear Enemy" is Sallie's growth into a more-than-competent and truly compassionate professional, a woman who can and does put her expensive education to real use. And at the heart of that growth is her development as a feminist. In one of her letters to Judy, she laughingly reports that a man of her acquaintance has thought to praise her by telling her she has an almost masculine facility of getting straight to the heart of a matter. "Aren't men funny?" she says. "When they want to pay you the greatest compliment in their power, they naively tell you that you have a masculine mind. There is one compliment, incidentally, that I shall never be paying him. I cannot honestly say that he has a quickness of perception almost feminine."As a child and as a teenager, and on into my adulthood, Sallie's able use of her mind and energy gave me a picture of the ideal woman, one who can find out what she wants and achieve it without abandoning her identity or her sense of humor. Many of us had to wait until the 1970s for that.Yes, some of Webster's stereotypes are cringe-worthy and will certainly be seen, a century later, as very much politically incorrect. As another reviewer here points out, her ideas about genetics and inheritance are both out of date (although they reflect what she was no doubt taught at Vassar) and dangerous. Thus I give the book four stars rather than five. But these things, after all, give readers an opportunity to learn what middle-class white Americans heard and read as common knowledge a century ago, which I believe is a valuable lesson. I'd love to teach the book in a high school or college class -- it could provide a starting point for a lot of interesting discussion. And it's loads of fun.

Dieser eine Stern bezieht sich nicht auf die Geschichte selbst. Die ist genauso herzerfrischend wie die von Daddy Long-Legs!Aber diese Ausgabe ist einfach grauenhaft und nimmt einem von vornherein jede Lust zu lesen. Beim Layout fehlen Absätze, der ganze Text ist in einem fort heruntergedruckt, man kann nur am Zeilenanfang erkennen, dass ein neuer Brief beginnt. Da nützt auch ein Rahmen drumherum nichts! Sehr schade!Aus dem gleichen polnischen Verlag ist die Daddy Long-Legs Ausgabe dagegen sehr empfehlenswert. Jeder Brief beginnt auf einer neuen Seite, die Schrift variiert, und es sind die köstlichen Originalzeichnungen des Autors abgedruckt.Die Größe der Bücher ist ungewöhnlich, sie liegen aber gut in der Hand und lassen sich gut halten und lesen.

国内にまとめて在庫する本でなく、取り寄せではないでしょうか。国内在庫分よりも、本屋に取り寄せてもらった値段でしたし。