From Children to Red Hatters: Diverse Images and Issues of Play, edited by David Kuschner, shows that play scholars are as inventive and wide ranging in their ideas as are children and adults at play. What topic other than play could inspire such disparate areas of study as the interactions between a monkey named E.T. and some young sheep, the origins of play among atomic particles, or the dress-up play of elderly women? The diversity in this book makes a fascinating read but poses a challenge to a reviewer. The book defies synthesis. Like play itself, variability is the defining feature of this volume.