About this title: 'The road to the City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick,' said the Witch; 'so you cannot miss it. When you get to Oz do not be afraid of him, but tell your story and ask him to help you.' A cyclone hits Kansas and whirls away Dorothy and her little dog Toto to the magical Land of Oz, where wild beasts talk, silver shoes have magic powers, and good witches offer protection with a kiss. But Dorothy has made an enemy of the Wicked Witch of the West. With her new friends the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion, they brave many dangers in search of the Wonderful Wizard in his ...
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Binding: Unknown Binding
Publisher: Dover Publications
Date Published: 1960
Description: Good. ---267 pgs. Interior-Nice overall condition. The soft cover has only light signs of aging. -Publish Place: New York-Size: 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. read more
""'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,' was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out." -L. Frank Baum (from the introduction)
I read this to my six-year-old and we adored it together. This book is layered, with an ability to please both child and adult, a rare thing in books these days as I am either bored out of my mind or the text is going over my child's head. It's nice to have something we can truly enjoy together.
"The Wonderful Wizard of Oz offers adventure and laughter for children and depth of thought for the adult. The psychological and political overtones were subtle but concrete and felt so applicable to our day. Some of our leaders might be very good men, but "very bad wizards." Or vice-versa. And maybe L. Frank Baum would have a thing or two to say in the medical community about the placebo effect. I for one could use some "bran-new brains," and I wouldn't mind needles in my head if it made people think I was sharp.
Despite all my deep thinking on the text, mostly this book is what Baum set out to do- a pleasing adventure tale set in a fascinating world with lovable characters. I knew this book was well written when my daughter declared, "I have a really good imagination mom! I can see it all in my mind!""
"I just picked up a copy this summer at the used book store to add to my son's collection and ended up reading it after reading Waking the Dead by John Eldredge because he references the story so often as he does other mythic tales, such as Lord of the Rings, the Matrix, and Narnia. I probably read it as a child, but it does have so much story than the movie, which we watched every year when it was aired on tv back when there was just 4 major networks.
Here is what John Eldredge says in Waking the Dead about the tin man "Notice there was a man who was one real and alive and in love. But after a series of blows, his humanity was reduced to efficiency. He became a sort of machine--a hollow man. At first, he did not even notice, for his condition made him an excellent woodman, as any person can become productive like a machine when he forgoes his heart. Notice also that it was the Wicked Witch who brough the disaster upon him. Baum's mythic tale reminds us that the Enemy knows how vital the heart is, even if we do not, and all his forces are fixed upon its destruction. For if he can disable or deaden your heart, then he has effectively foiled the plan of God, which was to create a world where love reigns. By taking out your heart, the Enemy takes out you, and you are essential to the Story."
"It's odd that this is the first time I've read an Oz book. I think I started one or two, long ago, and never finished them. But many people rave about Oz, and I love old books from that era (especially children's books), so recently I picked it up and read it through.
It didn't take long. In fact, I was quite surprised at how quickly I got through it. It's quite a short book. It's also very simply written. I don't think most young American children (say, ages 7 and up) would have any difficulty reading it at all. The grammar is slightly more formal than modern American English, but the vocabulary is startlingly ordinary; far less challenging than I'd expected.
Perhaps that's because most of the books I've read from that general era (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was first published in 1900) are English, and use a considerably deeper vocabulary. The majority of Americans would struggle with an unabridged Peter Pan or Winnie-the-Pooh, and be utterly defeated by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
That said, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was a nice, light, and very quick read with some pleasantly funny moments. I'd heard that it was an extended political parable - the scarecrow representing Midwestern farmers, the Tin Woodsman representing the factory workers of the new Industrial Revolution, and the Lion representing...actually, I don't remember - but if that's the case (and it may well be) the result certainly doesn't seem to very complex. I probably won't read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for myself again very soon, but I'll probably soon read it to my son - or see if he's interested in reading it for himself.
I can't help but wonder if I'd have loved the book if I had first read it when I was seven. But I just don't know.
Oh, I almost forgot: Of course I've seen the movie many times, and am quite fond of it. I expected the book to be very different from the movie, and it was - but it turned out that the movie was more faithful to the text than I'd realized. That said, I have to say that the movie actually seemed to make a strong theme (there's no place like home, of course) which the book lacked. But then, Dorothy seemed much younger in the book.
It was also interesting that in the book, the voyage to Oz was clearly NOT a dream (Uncle Henry had had to build a new house to replace the one that had been taken away by the tornado), whereas the movie made it fairly clear that Oz HAD all been Dorothy's fever-dream (since, among other things, the house was unchanged and still there)."
"I had planned on reading several books in this series (well at least the first three) but got off-track somehow (of course if you knew me, you'd know that isn't unusual). Not a bad story and the Scarecrow comes off a little better than was portrayed in the famous movie version. But I really want to read Baum's other books in this series (particularly The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz) as I loved the wonderful 1985 film version of them entitled "Return to Oz.""
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