A Blog of Bosh

ALISON LURIE: The Oddness of Oz
The year 2000 is the centenary of a famous and much-loved but essentially very odd children’s classic: L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. Those who recall the story only from childhood reading, or from the MGM film, have perhaps never realized how strange the original book and its sequels are.
The New York Review of Books

Enchanting visions of fairyland
We cannot get rid of the past, even if we try to. Just as history constantly informs the present, so childhood stays with us, shaping our gestures and responses. If the child makes the man, it is not surprising that children�s stories might also attract and please adults. Hans Christian Andersen took this insight one step further. He wrote fairytales that were aimed explicitly at both children and adults, and self-consciously used the form as a way of exploring autobiographical obsessions.
Another review of Wullschlager’s Andersen bio, plus TROUBLESOME THINGS – A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories
TROUBLESOME THINGS – A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories
The times

Children’s Christmas books
Recommendations from the Electronic Telegraph’s BooksOnLine

Boing! Pop-Up Books Are Growing Up Pop-up books may be the literary preserve of children, but lately the whirligig pages of flaps, foldouts, pull- tabs and double wheels are moving frenetically to attract grown-ups.
The New York Times

So Elegant, So Intelligent
T. S. ELIOT knew that his carefully constructed persona could be forbidding. He satirized himself, gently but tellingly, in a piece of light verse:
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And If and Perhaps and But.
[A review of WORDS ALONE: The Poet T. S. Eliot, by Denis Donoghue,326 pp., ew Haven:Yale University Press.]
The New York Times Book Review

The animator of worlds
[on Wullschlager’s biography of Hans Christian Andersen]
An unmarried man, without family of his own, he was dependent, emotionally and physically, on others until the day of his death, demanding assurance, consolation, praise and home comforts. In his sixties, he was described by an English visitor to one of his surrogate families as “a child … entirely egotistical, innocently vain, the centre of life, interest, concern and meaning to himself”. And after his death the great Danish critic, Georg Brandes, perhaps the first to appreciate quite how extraordinary and innovative his stories were, wrote that “Andersen’s mind was wholly filled by himself”.
Books Unlimited