The Real Wizard Of Oz: The Life And Times Of L. Frank Baum by Rebecca Loncraine (Gotham Books, hc, 352 pp, $28, out today August 20)
Just as the 1939 adaptation entitled The Wizard Of Oz is about to celebrate its 70th anniversary (with deluxe DVD editions next month), there’s a new biography of L. Frank Baum, who created this fantasy landscape in his 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz. And it’s quite good—despite my reservations about its scope (as you’ll see five paragraphs from now).
Following Baum (naturally) from cradle to grave, Loncraine paints a picture of an ambitious dreamer whose great expectations didn’t always greet reality. Born in 1856 in upstate New York, he was a youngster in an extended famly haunted by far too many child deaths, a boy who read Charles Dickens and, fascinated by printing, began his own newspaper (the Rose Lawn Home Journal...
Just as the 1939 adaptation entitled The Wizard Of Oz is about to celebrate its 70th anniversary (with deluxe DVD editions next month), there’s a new biography of L. Frank Baum, who created this fantasy landscape in his 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz. And it’s quite good—despite my reservations about its scope (as you’ll see five paragraphs from now).
Following Baum (naturally) from cradle to grave, Loncraine paints a picture of an ambitious dreamer whose great expectations didn’t always greet reality. Born in 1856 in upstate New York, he was a youngster in an extended famly haunted by far too many child deaths, a boy who read Charles Dickens and, fascinated by printing, began his own newspaper (the Rose Lawn Home Journal...
- 8/20/2009
- by no-reply@starlog.com (David McDonnell)
- Starlog
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