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Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered The Great American Story (2009)

by Evan I. Schwartz(Favorite Author)

3.73 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0547055102 (ISBN13: 9780547055107)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

review 1: I really wanted to love this, since it seemed to combine two of my favorite things: the history of the Gilded Age, and the story of the Oz books.Like many imaginative youths, I had my psyche permanently altered by L. Frank Baum's world in combination with John R. Neill's Art Nouveau illustrations of Oz and its terrifying inhabitants; which I was fortunate to have in early hardcover edition--a hand-me-down from my grandmother.But within the first 30 pages, Schwartz employed the phrase "thought leader" in reference to some personages of the nineteenth century and my experience of his book never managed to recover from the intrusion of that god-awful bit of TED talkery. What competent editor could have let that one through? Publishing is dead, they say.After that, I wasn't ab... morele to give Schwarz the benefit of the doubt any more, and although much of his research is interesting and thought-provoking, I became more and more annoyed with his use of the "conditional pluperfect" tense to shoehorn suppositions and undocumented speculations about what Baum and friends "might have been" doing 100 years ago into the standard pop-history narrative form that all these books seem to follow. "Frank and Matilda might have sung popular songs of the day as they took tea in Mrs. Gage's front parlor..." etc. A little of this goes a long, long way, and seeing that construction popping up on every page, sometimes more than once, quickly became unbearable.Even the gleaning of interesting knowledge, such as the fact that Baum's mother-in-law, who probably provided the model for several of the Ozian Witches, was both a feminist of historical rank and a Theosophist, was not enough to keep me reading this book after Schwartz begins blathering on about the teachings of Joseph Cambell. On page 76 he uses the word "bliss" in the "follow your..." sense, and I laid his book down never to resume. I have too many overdue Garry Wills books out from the library to spend any more time on this stuff.
review 2: It's just, nonfiction has to be kind of sparkly to make me like it. And this wasn't sparkly. And by sparkly, what I mean is that it didn't feel or read like a story, and there was nothing else extraordinary enough about it to make me love it in spite of that. The story felt like it was more about Maud - and God, I can't read that name without expecting Harold & ,and thus raising my expectations - and Matilda and the time period than about L. Frank. Yes we got a good idea of his ideals and his family and his background, but he felt like more of a mystery to me at the end than his mother-in-law did.So I feel like even from a technical, biographical standpoint - which would not be enough for me to enjoy it, trust me, but which might be enough for me to give it three stars - it wasn't such a success. I mean, I can't say for sure. I don't read many biographies. But I felt educated about the wrong things by the end of it.On a high note, though, the cover is stunning. less

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