Coscomment (Free subscription) | 11/15/2009
It never hurts to get the early jump on Christmas shopping, and what's even better is if you do it on-line. (Who needs crowded bookstores anyway') Please consider making Coscom Entertainment a part of your Christmas by picking up one or more of the books below for a friend or family member. Hey, even for yourself. Hope everyone has a terrific Holiday Season and we wish you all the best for the coming...
The Corner (Free subscription) | 11/13/2009
Some of the best Christmas gifts you can give to those little darlings are NR ’s acclaimed children’s books. We’ve got four great offers. The first is Volumes 1 and 2 of The National Review Treasury of Classic Children’s Literature . Two big, handsome, illustrated hard-covers featuring wholesome, fantastic, Bill Buckley-selected tales written by literary giants from Mark Twain,...
Reason Magazine - Hit & Run (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
How little you have to do to get into the feature well of a slick magazine these days. Thomas Mallon's takedown of Ayn Rand in The New Yorker is not online, but it is so phoned-in and lacking in protein that even this synopsis of the article feels padded. There's 1943-vintage prissy caviling about Rand's writing style. ("It is, in fact, badly executed on every level of language, plot, and characterization.")...
MediaBistro.com (Free subscription) | 11/02/2009
Last week an edition of L. Frank Baum 's "The Wizard of Oz" re-imagined by artist Graham Rawle won Book of the Year at the 2009 British Book Design and Production Awards. The UK version of the book was published by Atlantic Books, and Counterpoint/Soft Skull published the American edition . The 352-page book was filled with handcrafted photographs by the artist. Here's more from former Counterpoint/Soft...
MediaBistro.com (Free subscription) | 10/30/2009
Today's Book of the Day is The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum by Rebecca Longcraine. This book details Frank Baum's struggle to write and publish the famous series. Although The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was originally written in 1899,it was not published until 1900. Baum was an endlessly creative man that traveled widely throughout the US, gaining inspiration in every new place....
Oundle Travel Blog (Free subscription) | 10/30/2009
Staying at the Blakemore Hotel in Bayswater for one night, including breakfast Tickets to see Wicked on the 12th December Top price matinee tickets Prices from £118 per person Based on the acclaimed novel by Gregory Maguire that re-imagined the stories and characters created by L. Frank Baum in ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’, WICKED tells the incredible untold [...]
Auxiliary Memory (Free subscription) | 10/28/2009
When I was a dumbass kid of 10 I acquired a reading addiction by discovering the Oz books by L. Frank Baum. When I was a dumbass kid of nineteen, I dropped out of college for the first time and bought the fourteen Oz books and reread them. At nineteen I felt like a grownup [...]
forces of geek (Free subscription) | 10/19/2009
Last Thursday, as the nation was riveted by the saga of "Balloon Boy" Falcon Heene, I was reminded of the nation's first balloon hoax, perpetrated in 1844 by none other than America's first man of letters, Edgar Allan Poe. Poe presented a news article in the New York Sun in which he chronicled the first crossing of the Atlantic via balloon by world famous balloonist Monck Mason. Accompanying...
ArtsJournal (Free subscription) | 09/23/2009
"In 1900, a 44-year-old L. Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and became the father of the American fairy tale. … [He] was uniquely suited for this task. He was poised at the crossroads of his era - swept up in burgeoning feminism, the acceleration of new technologies, and the rise of huckster salesmanship."...
Metroblogging Seattle (Free subscription) | 08/31/2009
In a case of history repeating itself,just as L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was adapted for the state in a musical that became the toast of Broadway a couple years later, Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked, an imagined history of the land of Oz and its characters inspired by [...]
New York Times (Free subscription) | 08/24/2009
Rebecca Loncraine means to apply a Freudian logic to the stimuli that shaped the storytelling of L. Frank Baum, the author of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”
Austinist (Free subscription) | 08/18/2009
Marcie Dodd by Joan Marcus Wicked Through August 30 Bass Concert Hall ( 510 E. 23rd Street ) Tues- Fri 8 pm, Sat 2 & 8 pm, Sun 2 & 7:30 pm, prices vary, seats limited, the lottery is your best bet (see review for details) [ info ] | [ tickets ] The first thing you need to know about Wicked is that you should go see it. It’s fabulous. Before we drill down into the fabulousness, the second...
Chicago Tribune (Free subscription) | 08/09/2009
Follow the Yellow Brick Road (well, OK, Lincoln Street) through Wamego to the Oz Museum. Go through the door and you won't be in Kansas anymore. For Johnpaul Cafiero and his siblings, the annual screening of "The Wizard of Oz" meant home-baked chocolate chip cookies in front of the TV. They knew the story backward and forward. Their grandmother owned a signed first edition of the L. Frank...
Book Nut (Free subscription) | 07/27/2009
Oh My Gosh. This was an incredibly hard thing to do: chop everyone's lovely recommendations to a list of 100 that is not only reflective of all the wonderful middle grade writing, but also reflects the diversity out there. There's books about people of color, of course (though not as many as I think there *could* be), but fantasy, adventure, family-oriented, classics, new books, boy books, girl books...
Book Nut (Free subscription) | 07/23/2009
Here's the first draft of the list. Some explanations: I checked everything against my library's catalog -- I figured they're a good standard (I love my library!) -- and if it was shelved in the teen space or they didn't have it, off the list it went. Also, for series, I put the first book, except for The Dark is Rising and Ramona Quimby, where I put what I thought was the best one, since they don't...
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