会说话的老虎、会哲学的熊、非常非常饿的毛毛虫、充满智慧的蜘蛛、无私的树、友善的鼹鼠、彬彬有礼的大象：这些角色们陪伴着一代又一代的孩子们入睡。这些童书不但娱乐我們孩子，其实同时也教育他们关于外面世界的自然历史，帮助他们从小就发展出对于大环境的好奇心、尊重以及欣赏。
 
本书的作者是一位科学家，本身也是父亲，他在书中探索了一些最知名的童书里担任基础的环保理念。从《彼得兔》到《哈利波特》，《小熊维尼》到《饥饿游戏》许多经典童书其实希望灌入孩子脑里的不是一些有趣的故事，而是一些尊重地球、爱护环境的价值观。我們现在关心的环境问题，包括温室效应、灭绝危机、森林砍伐等等，其实都是我們孩子在未来更需要担心的问题。于是，我們最好能够让他们从小就有意识。
 
本书按照主题作结构，从文学中的森林到充满色彩的角色到全球性的环境，作者担任导游带着读者深入思考那些放在孩子床边的书。看完这本书，跟孩子阅读床边故事的经验会完全不同，你也更能够帮助孩子透过这些书来了解如何爱护他们的世界。
 
目录：
Introduction

Section One: On Reading
            The Existential Princess: A Fairy Tale
1 Beasts at Bedtime: Reading about Nature with Children
2 Doctor Dolittle and the Question of Reading

Section Two: Pastoral Stories
            Topophilia
3 The Pastoral Promise: And They All Lived Happily Ever After
4 The Ecology of Pooh
5 Peter Rabbit’s Brutal Paradise
6 In the Garden of Earthly Delights
7 Beyond the Pool of Darkness: The Pastoral Roots of Irish Stories

Section Three: Wilderness Stories
            Lost in the Popo Agie Wilderness
8 On the Mallard
9 Where the Wild Things Always Were
10 Wild and Grimm Fairy Tales: Wilderness on the Margins
11 “Gollumgate”: Tolkien and Ireland
12 “I Am in Fact a Hobbit”: Tolkien as Environmentalist
13 The Tin Woodman’s Path of Carnage through the Land of Oz
14 Hunger and Thirst in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games

Section Four: Children on Wild Islands
            Old Tom’s Island
15 The Why and the What of Islands
16 Archmage Ged, Merlin, and Harry Potter and the Training of Wizards and Witches
17 Is L. T. Meade the Real Author of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five?
18 Robinson Crusoe: Now Here’s a Cannibalism Tale for Every Child
19 On Isles Benevolent; on Isles Malevolent

Section Five: Urban Stories
            The Urban Wild
20 The Urban to Rural Gradient of Children’s Stories: The Happy Prince
21 Antipathy to Urban Life in Nursery Rhymes
22 Urban Decay: R. Crumb in the Nursery
23 The Escape Artist: Calvin and Hobbes and the Suburban Idyll
24 Babar: Elephant and Urban Adapter

Section Six: Learning to Care
            And the World Hummed Back
25 Caring for the Rose: Environmental Literacy and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince
26 What Then Should We Do? The Lorax in the Twenty-First Century

Section Seven: Good Night, Sleep Tight
            In the Tot Lot
27 Bookend Conversations
 
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
 
好评：
Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach Trilogy
“A fascinating and fresh new look at animal tales, often classic, and how they pertain to the present-day and our often fraught relationship to our environment. Highly relevant and highly recommended.”
 
Seth Lerer, author of Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter
“This is a beautifully written, personal, and evocative book about children’s literature and the fostering of an environmental sensibility through acts of reading with the child. There is a genuinely musical, almost mystical quality to Heneghan’s writing. Deeply felt and voiced by a highly personalized narrative persona, Beasts at Bedtime reads, at times, like a nighttime tale to a child; at times, like a comforting set of adages to a confused adult; at times, like a TED talk.”
 
Timothy Morton, author of Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People
“Don't put this book down or click it away. Stunningly scholarly yet also moving and magical, Beasts at Bedtime is a brilliant treatise and true ideological work. What you are holding is a permission and a chance to read stories in a way that was previously closed off to adults. Thank you, Liam Heneghan, for doing your bit for the rest of us—human and nonhuman alike—unlike and in between.”
 
关于作者：
Liam Heneghan是美国DePaul大学的环境科学研究教授。他来自都柏林，同时是一位诗人以及两个孩子的爸爸。