>William Bennett

READ ME A STORY, PLEASE

"I DIDN'T COMPILE THIS BOOK BECAUSE I wanted to do something aside from my usual work," says former drug czar William Bennett, 50, who now makes his living writing, editing and speaking. "This is the work. To teach right and wrong to our children is a fundamental imperative." Bennett launched his ambitious project in 1988 with his own list of 150 stories, which, with help from Library of Congress researcher John Crib, grew like Jack's beanstalk.

"When I wasn't sure of a story, I'd read it to my sons [John, 9 and Joseph, 4]," says Bennett, whose own mother, a divorced secretary, kindled his boyhood imagination with Greek myths and poetry. "There was a story about a little person called Please, who lives in a young boy's mouth but doesn't get much exercise because he's not let out often. I wondered if it was too cute, but my 4-year-old insisted.

"A lot of what I see on television is pointless conflict and a lot of noise," he says. "These stories believe that kids have souls, hearts and minds." So can parents really tear their tots away from Beavis for the Brothers Grimm? Absolutely, says Bennett: "Often children aren't sitting in front of TV by choice. They're there because no one has asked them to be in their lap."