A story book with great stories. Needless to say this isn't the time and place (pun intended) to review them all. So, I will review its greatest story - in my humble opinion that is.

"And Mr Einstein, who is the smartest man in the whole history of the world, he has proved -- absolutely proved -- that time is just another dimension, just like space. Time is what happens when you can go up and down, side to side, in and out, and before and after." So, tells Gilbert his incredulous friends Neils, Erwin and Emmy.

Like any good story, ” Another Time, Another Place ” by Cory Doctorow delivers on both, entertainment and depth. Within a setting we can picture vividly, the young protagonist and friends remind us poignantly of our own childhood. Its youthful actors are characteristically curious and inquisitive and such is their interaction with their wondrous world. Their nimble - unbiased by the established - minds make perceptions change with the power of their imagination, to having us worried whether, indeed, we have already succumbed to the most wide-spread of all adult-onset diseases, the calcification of thinking. If you are willing to dig deeper you will find layers of meanings buried within Cory Doctorow’s masterpiece. For when we finally get to the crux of the matter, the fundamental, underlying principle of the universe, we find ourselves not only questioning our own encrusted perceptions of reality but also in awe of a tapestry that only the intertwining strands of physics and analytic philosophy can weave – a cosmology that is more fantastic that any myth or folktale. - If our scientist and philosophers are right that is. Notwithstanding that, ultimately, “Another Time, Another Place”, does perhaps what matters most, it teaches us the value of the philosophic though experiment and admonishes us not to succumb to the one-tracked, monolithic procedural of academia. Scientific breakthroughs are enabled through paradigm shifts, denied without a fundamental change of perception and impossible to attain without a faculty of wonder.
Our hero Gilbert and the character of Emmy show us the contrast between flexibility and rigidness, the wonder of expanding the mind and bowing to the established. Unlike Emmy who represents the conservative, Gilbert is equality endowed with faculty of wonder and flexibility of perception when he makes himself experience time as space. In doing so he overcomes the common and unfortunately false perception that space is different from time and adopts the true physical reality of space-time according to Albert Einstein. This new perception opens a whole new avenue of possibility.
Imagine your mind can perceive the physics of space-time enabling you to travel in time just as we do in space. As your mind accepts and assimilates the similarity of space and time you may travel not only backwards in time but most importantly sideways.
To trigger Einstein's perception of space-time, Gilbert needs both, the faculty of wonder and perhaps a bit more mundane, a hand car and rails to make time analogous to space. To Gilberts delight his thought experiment becomes reality, and he finds that even though there are no pathways allowing continuous movement between the parallel rails of the multiverse - after all this is not Newton's perception of reality anymore but the Bohr-Einsteinian universe and beyond- akin to the teleporting discontinuous quantum-jumping electron he is able to make his own discontinuous jumps from handcar to handcar, from universe to universe. The realm of all the infinite alternative “what-might-have-beens”, in his grasp, the death of his beloved father, the motivating factor to his handcar journey, can be undone.
Last but not least, if the concepts and prospects within Doctorow’s short story appeal to you, you may want to give Jack Finney’s “Time and again” a try. Finney’s novel expands on Doctorow’s short story providing great entertainment scaffolded by Einstein’s concepts of relativity and space-time. ( )

When I was a young child, I wrote a letter to the publisher of The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, offering my theories on what might have happened to the author. I was such a cute, precocious little nerd. Now as an adult I can obviously tell who really illustrated that book, but it's still much beloved by me. I was super excited about this collection, but I felt like it was just OK. There weren't a lot of standout stories for me. I found it really interesting how many times sailors and sea voyages were themes, and how many times the authors chose to end their story with the quotation from the original picture book. Lemony Snicket's intro was amazing and I loved the story by MT Anderson, but this wasn't a must read like I'd hoped. Also it was bizarrely categorized as a Young Adult book at my library which I think is because a lot of the authors write for teens but I think it holds more appeal for people like me who read the original book as children. ( )

Enjoyed this collection of stories based on Chris Val Allsburg's drawings. Quite a variety of styles and types of stories. My favorite was 'The Third Floor Bedroom'. A recommended companion to [The Mysteries of Harris Burdick]. ( )

I was so excited about this, because of the list of authors and because of how much I adored the original as a child. Turns out the wonder lies in the "shall be told another time" aspect of the originals. It's so much better to keep the questions open.

A fantastic collection of 14 stories by well-known authors including Steven King, Lois Lowry, and Linda Sue Park. These short stories accompany the original illustrations in the short picture book, "The Mysteries of Harris Burdick" by Chris Van Allsburg. My favorite story is by Walter Dean Myers entitled 'Mr. Linden's Library' where books take on a life of their own and change a young girls life. ( )