"Meek little Mole, willful Ratty, Badger the perennial bachelor, and petulant Toad. Since their first appearance over a hundred years ago in 1908, they've become emblematic archetypes of eccentricity, folly, and friendship. And their misadventures--in gypsy caravans, stolen sports cars, and their beloved Wild Wood--continue to capture readers' imaginations and warm their hearts long after they grow up. Begun as a series of letters from Kenneth Grahame...

Campbell's heroine is 16-year-old Margo Crane. Complicit in her father's death, Margo flees home for the Stark River. And as she follows the current, she learns the ways of the world from the eccentric characters she meets.

A brief, simplified retelling of the episode in "The Wind in the Willows" during which Mole meets Rat, who takes him for a row down the river for a picnic and introduces him to many other animals there

When Mort Rosenblum, world-weary foreign correspondent, moved aboard a 54-foot boat moored in the center of Paris, he knew that life would be sweet. Damp perhaps. And sometimes ripe with the smell of diesel fuel. But sunning himself on deck for the first time, in sight of characters out of Hugo or Flaubert, enjoying his view of the Eiffel Tower as the wake from a bateau-mouche sloshed the Burgundy in his wine glass, he realized that he had entered...

In addition to remarkable notes on automobiles (Toad drove an Armstrong Hardcastle Special Eight), picnics, Gypsies, caravans, old English mansions, peculiar dukes, and even modern manifestations (Disney's "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride"), scholar Annie Gauger has uncovered extraordinary new material on Kenneth Grahame, his troubled family life, and the origins of the story. Her preface puts Grahame's work in historical and literary context, and she provides...