The Wizard of Oz (Tor Classics) by L. Frank Baum Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $0.87 You Save: $4.12 (83%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of The Wizard of Oz (Tor Classics)
Book Review: The Wizard of Oz
Summary: 5 Stars
The Wizard of Oz is a story about a girl named Dorothy. She lives in Kansas where there are lots of tornados. She also has a dog named Toto who lives on a farm with her and her Aunt Em, Uncle Henry, and the workers that help Aunt Em and Uncle Henry on the farm. The next-door neighbor hates Toto because he gets in her crops and chases her ugly cat. She comes out with a rake and tries to catch Toto and poke him with the rake.
Dorothy loves to sing and is always doing something she's not supposed to do. Dorothy also goes places that are completely unknown to her. Toto is black and very small. She spends most of the time with Toto because she doesn't have any friends in Kansas.
I relate to Dorothy because she's very outgoing and is always in mischief just like me. Dorothy is a neat person and I really want to meet someone like her some day.
Dorothy is a very normal person and she isn't very wild like some characters in books. I like that. I like normal, not weird and not wild.
Book Review: Wonderful "Wizard of Oz"
Summary: 5 Stars
I was a reasonably big fan of the "Wizard of Oz" when I was a kid. I'd seen the Judy Garland film, the "Return to Oz" film, my parents had taken me to a theatre production, and there used to be a cartoon series about Dorothy and her friends that I quite liked. Here in Australia, though, you don't see an awful lot of the Wizard of Oz books, and I missed out on all that as a kid. I managed to find a copy just recently of the the original story, and I really liked it. It's really a shame I couldn't find it earlier.
Dorothy is a girl who lives with her aunt and her uncle in the countryside of Kansas. In the midst of a "cyclone", Dorothy, her dog Toto, and her whole house are swept away to the Land of Oz, a beautiful but strange world full of all sorts of interesting creatures, good and bad witches, and a very famous wizard. Dorothy tries to find her way home, and on the way makes many new friends, like the Scarecrow, "Tin Woodsman" and the cowardly lion. Will she ever make it home?
It's rather different to the movie, I found. For one, the journey Dorothy and her friends go on takes many days, whereas the in the Judy Garland film it seems to all take place much shorter. The magic shoes Dorothy picks up in Oz are silver here, and not ruby red like in the film. There are also a lot of other creatures and things in the book, like the queen of the mice, the Hammerheads, and the Dainty China people. Though the world of Oz seems pretty big in the film, it feels a lot bigger to me in the book. Oz has a nice atmosphere too, I thought. It's very cosy and familiar, and kind of evokes a kind of America the way that say C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien evokes a kind of Britain, if that makes any sense. North, south, east, west... in Oz's every direction there's a new land to explore. You never know who you might meet, or how they'll do things there. I quite like how laid back everyone is in Oz. The way the Munchkins and the people of the Emerald City speak, for instance.
I enjoyed finding out things about my favorite characters too, like how the Tinman became made of tin and how the flying monkeys became slave to the wicked witch of the west, which is all described here. That reminds me, there is a little bit of fairy tale violence here, but nothing worse than you might find in "Little Red Riding Hood".
All in all, a great read, I thought. Whimsical, colourful and fun. I do hope I can get my hands on some of the follow up books. Good thing there's amazon!
Book Review: For Before or After "Wicked" (The Broadway Play)
Summary: 5 Stars
The Wizard of Oz--Still a classic, though some of us may have escaped our youth without actually reading the book. The play "Wicked" whets one's appetite for the original story, and this little classic is well done...Quick and easy to read, good type face and good leading between the lines (something we didn't worry about in our youth). There may be other, better illustrated editions, but this one gets the job done and gets it done very nicely if you want to re-read or remember something we should remember from our youth--the book, not the movie!! Suggest reading it after seeing "Wicked"...That allows more creative license in the play, thus more enjoyment and capitivation with that story rather than continually comparing it to the original Oz.
"I'm a good man, just a bad wizard..." What a line!!! Even now, after all these years. (And don't you wish there really were Yellow Brick Roads!! Life would be as easy now as we perceive it was then...)
Book Review: After All These Years
Summary: 5 Stars
I have to admit, until this year I didn't care much for the Wizard of Oz. It was my wife's favorite movie (and she even has checks with Oz scenes on them), but it never was "fantasy" enough for me. I had been an avid modern fantasy/sci-fi reader until this year when I started reading classics like the Hobbit, the Chronicles of Narnia, and ultimately I picked up the Wizard of Oz.
This book is a wonderful read and I fully intend to finish the entire series. There is something so pure and simple about Baum's tale that I find myself entranced and wanting more. This book enchanted me, and immersed me in a world I wished I could visit. I love feeling amazed when I read a book, and this book amazed me.
The only thing I didn't care for in this edition is the time spent by Eloise McGraw in the forward addressing the writing style and prose of Baum. For those of you concerned that this is not the Grapes of Wrath, well...is isn't. It also is everything I need in 2006 and the world is heavy with war and hatred: a fantasy tale that takes me away from my troubles and sets me sailing into Oz. I am very glad this isn't classic literature...very glad. I hope you understand that statement as a comment of praise for Baum.
Book Review: New to an old classic
Summary: 4 Stars
Like many, perhaps most, adults, I had only been familiar with L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from the classic 1939 movie. It was therefore an interesting exercise to read the original version of Dorothy's story--the first book, published in 1899, of what came to be a very lengthy series--and compare it with the film version. There are some substantial differences between the two. In the film version, Dorothy's journey to Oz is an unreal episode, an elaborate dream experienced after being hit on the head. Her dream world and her real life, meanwhile, were symmetrical insofar as some of the principal characters from Kansas were translated into characters in Oz. There is no such symmetry in Baum's version. The witch-like Miss Gulch and humbuggy Professor Marvel, the farm hands Hickory, Huck, and Zeke do not appear in the book. Further, Dorothy's house really is transported to Oz in the cyclone, and when she returns to Kansas Dorothy does so bodily: that is, she travels from Oz and does not merely wake from a dream. Smaller differences between the book and film versions are numerous.
On the whole, I think that the movie tells a tighter, more interesting story than does the book. The Wicked Witch of the West--whose demise in the book is strangely anticlimactic--plays a much bigger role in the film. This holds the story together nicely just as does the symmetry between Dorothy's real and unreal worlds. The movie also omits a good many of the less interesting episodes included in the book, such as Dorothy's adventures among the Dainty China people. What the book has to offer, in turn, is more on the characters' back stories, in particular those of the Tin Woodman and, of all creatures, the Flying Monkeys--much maligned, misunderstood beasts that they are. Who would have guessed their sad plight from the Monkeys' nightmare-inducing depiction in the movie?
While some of Baum's book could have been excised without losing anything, and though the movie tells an arguably better story, Baum's writing is pleasant and his characters well-developed and interesting. It's not surprising that the book has inspired so much affection over the years.
Debra Hamel -- author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in ancient Greece (Yale University Press, 2003)