A Reading Vocation

This was a sweet story about a soldier and his adopted bear cub, who eventually was surrendered to the London Zoo when the man's battalion went into battle in World War I. Lots of cute paintings of Winnie and the other soldiers' reaction to her -- it's hard to believe a fundamentally wild animal could grow up as such a big "teddy bear." The subtitle is a little misleading, though, as Winnie didn't exactly inspire Winnie the Pooh. Nothing in her story overlaps with the fictional Winnie except that they both had a love of condensed milk. Christopher Robin spent a lot of time at Winnie's cage and was so taken by her that he named his teddy bear after her. And his father then wrote his children's books around the toy, not the real Winnie in the zoo. I've never been a huge fan of Pooh, so I think I would have liked it better if those books were based more closely on the real Winnie.