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seejeremyread's review against another edition
3.0
This is a mostly interesting, comprehensive biography of L. Frank Baum that sometimes reads like a history thesis. Baum's early life is not well-documented, so the author tends to make statements like "He must have felt like..." or "one can only imagine that..." in places where the facts run thin. Still, the book seems to parallel Baum's legacy in an interesting way. To this point, much of what I "knew" about Baum was based on a made-for-TV movie from 1990 (starring John Ritter as Baum). If this book is accurate, then the film glosses over and invents many interesting aspects of Baum's life, much like the timeless 1939 THE WIZARD OF OZ film takes license with the original work. Aside from that, Baum's story does not really seem unique: a dreamer/artist who struggles inadvertantly stumbles onto a fame with a creation he did not intend. Eventually after bad decisions and perhaps an overestimation of his own abilities, he goes back to his creation that initially brought him his fame-- grudgingly at first and finally, as a slave. This biography captures that bittersweetness well, but points of for a complete failure to mention how Gregory Maguire's books and the phenomenon that is WICKED have reignited Baum's legacy as the creator, chronicler, and Royal Historian of Oz.
tamdot's review against another edition
3.0
Almost everyone in the United States knows the story of the Wizard of Oz. Whether you’re familiar with it from TV reruns of the 1939 MGM classic or from reading the books, chances are you’re well acquainted with Dorothy and her quest to follow the Yellow Brick Road.
What you may not know is that like Dorothy, her creator, L. Frank Baum, experienced a tornado when he was young. Or that Baum’s interest in spiritualism informed his creation of the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion.
In his Oz books, Baum clearly followed the old adage: write what you know. He may not have physically been to Oz and walked through the Emerald City, but he used everything from his life to inform his creations. Rebecca Loncraine (www.rebeccaloncraine.come) takes a detailed look at Baum’s life and its ties to his fiction in The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum.
She begins eight years before Baum’s birth with a glimpse at the growing fad for mediums who could contact the dead and the effects of a diphtheria epidemic on Baum’s family. Her attention to detail is great, and a reader comes away from the early parts of the biography with a full understanding of growing up in the latter half of the 19th century. At times, the level of detail can frustrate a reader, who wants to get to the good stuff, when Baum comes into his own and begins writing.
Patience is a virtue as each chapter detailing Baum’s young life sets the stage for the next chapter. His family newspaper, created when he was a child, holds the seeds of his later fiction. As does his interest in theater. In 1882, Baum married Maud Gage. His close ties with her family would lead him to follow his brother-in-law to Dakota Territory where he experienced droughts and conditions similar to those Dorothy Gale would face before her fateful tornado ride. He also wrote about reports of Sitting Bull’s ghost dancers in his Aberdeen Saturday pioneer, a newspaper he acquired in 1889.
Baum began working on The Wizard of Oz in 1898. He drew on his memories of Civil War amputees, his fear of scarecrows, the Chicago World’s Fair and a powerful imagination to create his world. His niece, Dorothy Gage, was born one month after Baum started writing. She would die five months later.
Once The Wizard of Oz is published, Loncraine’s book picks up momentum. Oz becomes a incredible success, allowing Baum to write other fairy tales and to further explore Oz. He creates a stage musical of the book, which dazzled audiences with its use of electric light and stage trickery.
Financially successful, Baum continues the Oz series, using the books to create a world that should be, rather than the world rapidly growing in the 20th century. Uncle Henry and Auntie Em face bankruptcy in an Oz sequel so Dorothy arranges for them live in a utopian Oz.
Loncraine follows Baum through the wild success of Oz and his alter ego pseudonyms, his financial highs and lows, all the while emphasizing Baum’s love of children and childhood and his dedication to imagination. The book continues past his death in 1918to Maud’s attendance at the 1939 MGM premiere.
The Real Wizard of Oz isn’t just a biography of L. Frank Baum, but a biography of Oz. The two are intertwined, perhaps just as Baum would have it be
What you may not know is that like Dorothy, her creator, L. Frank Baum, experienced a tornado when he was young. Or that Baum’s interest in spiritualism informed his creation of the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion.
In his Oz books, Baum clearly followed the old adage: write what you know. He may not have physically been to Oz and walked through the Emerald City, but he used everything from his life to inform his creations. Rebecca Loncraine (www.rebeccaloncraine.come) takes a detailed look at Baum’s life and its ties to his fiction in The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum.
She begins eight years before Baum’s birth with a glimpse at the growing fad for mediums who could contact the dead and the effects of a diphtheria epidemic on Baum’s family. Her attention to detail is great, and a reader comes away from the early parts of the biography with a full understanding of growing up in the latter half of the 19th century. At times, the level of detail can frustrate a reader, who wants to get to the good stuff, when Baum comes into his own and begins writing.
Patience is a virtue as each chapter detailing Baum’s young life sets the stage for the next chapter. His family newspaper, created when he was a child, holds the seeds of his later fiction. As does his interest in theater. In 1882, Baum married Maud Gage. His close ties with her family would lead him to follow his brother-in-law to Dakota Territory where he experienced droughts and conditions similar to those Dorothy Gale would face before her fateful tornado ride. He also wrote about reports of Sitting Bull’s ghost dancers in his Aberdeen Saturday pioneer, a newspaper he acquired in 1889.
Baum began working on The Wizard of Oz in 1898. He drew on his memories of Civil War amputees, his fear of scarecrows, the Chicago World’s Fair and a powerful imagination to create his world. His niece, Dorothy Gage, was born one month after Baum started writing. She would die five months later.
Once The Wizard of Oz is published, Loncraine’s book picks up momentum. Oz becomes a incredible success, allowing Baum to write other fairy tales and to further explore Oz. He creates a stage musical of the book, which dazzled audiences with its use of electric light and stage trickery.
Financially successful, Baum continues the Oz series, using the books to create a world that should be, rather than the world rapidly growing in the 20th century. Uncle Henry and Auntie Em face bankruptcy in an Oz sequel so Dorothy arranges for them live in a utopian Oz.
Loncraine follows Baum through the wild success of Oz and his alter ego pseudonyms, his financial highs and lows, all the while emphasizing Baum’s love of children and childhood and his dedication to imagination. The book continues past his death in 1918to Maud’s attendance at the 1939 MGM premiere.
The Real Wizard of Oz isn’t just a biography of L. Frank Baum, but a biography of Oz. The two are intertwined, perhaps just as Baum would have it be
saroz162's review against another edition
3.0
A few books have been written on L. Frank Baum in the past. Most of them assume some familiarity with his life and work, with the authors perhaps recognizing that much of their reading audience will be fans of the Oz series. This book is the first I've seen in the celebrity biography vein, attempting to appeal to the casual reader by couching Baum's life in his culture and times. That it is a populist book is pretty much apparent from the cover: it's designed to catch your eye and tweak some familiarity with the imagery and typeface you find on other Wizard of Oz-oriented merchandise.
The problem with a project like this, to a large degree, is that Baum's life isn't all that remarkable. It's certainly in no way sensational. There is no potential scandal attached to Baum, unlike Lewis Carroll or Hans Christian Andersen; he didn't have any nebulous health issues, he wasn't gay, and he never secluded himself from the public. He was a natural-born storyteller, a bit of a dreamer, and he was terrible with money. That's...pretty much it. As a result, Rebecca Loncraine doesn't have any marketable crises or issues around which to revolve her 300-page book, so she makes up for it by skewing her material in two different ways. Both of them are treading on thin ice.
The first zeros in on Baum's sometimes contradictory but generally progressive ideas, emphasizing the one aspect that people today might find extraordinary: theosophism. As an adult Baum was a theosophist, somewhere between agnostic and New Ager, who believed in elemental spirits, a non-specific God who could be found in every living thing, and elements of reincarnation. That's a fascinating subject, and I'm glad Loncraine chose to explain theosophism for her audience and offer some insight into Baum's spiritual mindset. However, from the very outset of the book, she places her story in the context of spiritualism. She starts the book not with Baum's family, but the Fox sisters, who claimed to be mediums. Baum probably never had any contact with them and may not have given them more thought than most people give a movie star. Yet Loncraine insists on emphasizing every childhood death in his family, every evidence that he or his wife or his mother-in-law were interested in seances or mediums, with the implication that it inspired him (or haunted him) to create fantasy stories. I've just never seen any evidence that L. Frank Baum was any more or less interested in spirits than any other man of the early 1900s - when spiritualism was basically a craze - and more to the point, Loncraine never provides any of that evidence herself. Almost everything she posits is broad and hypothetical. Yes, it could be that Baum directed an interest in spirits or a fear of child death into his stories. It might also be that he just had a really big and active imagination.
At very least, the spiritualism stuff is interesting, if tangential. Loncraine's second hobby horse is markedly less original. She is very, very interested in trying to find "the inspiration" for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, something many people have tried and failed to do. Loncraine leaves no potential yellow brick unturned, suggesting that the low-budget opulence of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair inspired the sham of Wizard's Emerald City, that a childhood dream became the Scarecrow, that Civil War amputees became the Tin Woodman. It's all possible, of course, but Loncraine doesn't offer any quotes to add plausibility to her argument: she just throws these theories out there for readers to take at face value. Similarly, she makes all sorts of assumptions about Baum's mindset and mood in general; for instance, at one point, she names two major deaths in Baum's world in 1898. One is his mother-and-law, which makes perfect sense, and the other...is Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll, whom Baum never met. Lewis Carroll, who has only featured in two prior paragraphs within the book. Lewis Carroll, who is only mentioned in Baum's own words in the most generally respectful of terms. Okay, so Baum read Carroll. Was he necessarily one of his heroes? Would he have greeted news of his death with anything more than, "That's too bad"? We don't know. We are given no evidence one way or another in this book.
I have now spent a lot of time harping on Loncraine's biography, but I feel forced to do so because her tangents are so terribly, terribly distracting. I can't decide if the book was written quickly or just edited very poorly, but either way, it's a frustrating read. As soon as you get engrossed in a good, objective section, you get pulled out by a strong dose of authorial influence and pushed in a direction it may not make sense to go. I'm glad I read The Real Wizard of Oz, but I really do wish the author had chosen to treat her subject with a lighter hand. Not every man lives a sensationalized life, and not every molehill need be made into a mountain.
The problem with a project like this, to a large degree, is that Baum's life isn't all that remarkable. It's certainly in no way sensational. There is no potential scandal attached to Baum, unlike Lewis Carroll or Hans Christian Andersen; he didn't have any nebulous health issues, he wasn't gay, and he never secluded himself from the public. He was a natural-born storyteller, a bit of a dreamer, and he was terrible with money. That's...pretty much it. As a result, Rebecca Loncraine doesn't have any marketable crises or issues around which to revolve her 300-page book, so she makes up for it by skewing her material in two different ways. Both of them are treading on thin ice.
The first zeros in on Baum's sometimes contradictory but generally progressive ideas, emphasizing the one aspect that people today might find extraordinary: theosophism. As an adult Baum was a theosophist, somewhere between agnostic and New Ager, who believed in elemental spirits, a non-specific God who could be found in every living thing, and elements of reincarnation. That's a fascinating subject, and I'm glad Loncraine chose to explain theosophism for her audience and offer some insight into Baum's spiritual mindset. However, from the very outset of the book, she places her story in the context of spiritualism. She starts the book not with Baum's family, but the Fox sisters, who claimed to be mediums. Baum probably never had any contact with them and may not have given them more thought than most people give a movie star. Yet Loncraine insists on emphasizing every childhood death in his family, every evidence that he or his wife or his mother-in-law were interested in seances or mediums, with the implication that it inspired him (or haunted him) to create fantasy stories. I've just never seen any evidence that L. Frank Baum was any more or less interested in spirits than any other man of the early 1900s - when spiritualism was basically a craze - and more to the point, Loncraine never provides any of that evidence herself. Almost everything she posits is broad and hypothetical. Yes, it could be that Baum directed an interest in spirits or a fear of child death into his stories. It might also be that he just had a really big and active imagination.
At very least, the spiritualism stuff is interesting, if tangential. Loncraine's second hobby horse is markedly less original. She is very, very interested in trying to find "the inspiration" for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, something many people have tried and failed to do. Loncraine leaves no potential yellow brick unturned, suggesting that the low-budget opulence of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair inspired the sham of Wizard's Emerald City, that a childhood dream became the Scarecrow, that Civil War amputees became the Tin Woodman. It's all possible, of course, but Loncraine doesn't offer any quotes to add plausibility to her argument: she just throws these theories out there for readers to take at face value. Similarly, she makes all sorts of assumptions about Baum's mindset and mood in general; for instance, at one point, she names two major deaths in Baum's world in 1898. One is his mother-and-law, which makes perfect sense, and the other...is Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll, whom Baum never met. Lewis Carroll, who has only featured in two prior paragraphs within the book. Lewis Carroll, who is only mentioned in Baum's own words in the most generally respectful of terms. Okay, so Baum read Carroll. Was he necessarily one of his heroes? Would he have greeted news of his death with anything more than, "That's too bad"? We don't know. We are given no evidence one way or another in this book.
I have now spent a lot of time harping on Loncraine's biography, but I feel forced to do so because her tangents are so terribly, terribly distracting. I can't decide if the book was written quickly or just edited very poorly, but either way, it's a frustrating read. As soon as you get engrossed in a good, objective section, you get pulled out by a strong dose of authorial influence and pushed in a direction it may not make sense to go. I'm glad I read The Real Wizard of Oz, but I really do wish the author had chosen to treat her subject with a lighter hand. Not every man lives a sensationalized life, and not every molehill need be made into a mountain.
tmleblanc's review against another edition
3.0
I don't often ready biographies, but I have had a lifelong love affair with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and after finally seeing Wicked on stage, I had to know more about the man that birthed Oz.
The writing was choppy and seemed forced which seemed to mirror Baum's haphazard life and career--moving from place to place never quite finding his equilibrium until he start writing and publishing his children's books. After reaching the end of the book, the final chapter or epilogue was probably the best writing in the book. The author, I feel, has a stronger affection for the movie than Baum and his original Oz novels based on the level of detail given towards the making of the 1939 classic movie. I do have a new found knowledge regarding the differences in the movie and the first Oz book. Since I finished the book, I have been asking myself, why would Dorothy wanted to return to dust bowl of Kansas in the middle of the Great Depression?
The book provides a great background on Baum's life. However, at times it feels like you are barely moving forward.
The writing was choppy and seemed forced which seemed to mirror Baum's haphazard life and career--moving from place to place never quite finding his equilibrium until he start writing and publishing his children's books. After reaching the end of the book, the final chapter or epilogue was probably the best writing in the book. The author, I feel, has a stronger affection for the movie than Baum and his original Oz novels based on the level of detail given towards the making of the 1939 classic movie. I do have a new found knowledge regarding the differences in the movie and the first Oz book. Since I finished the book, I have been asking myself, why would Dorothy wanted to return to dust bowl of Kansas in the middle of the Great Depression?
The book provides a great background on Baum's life. However, at times it feels like you are barely moving forward.
ssejig's review against another edition
3.0
Ended up giving this one three stars just because it was such a fast read. Don't know if info on Baum is scarce but I had hoped for a little more. Lots of filler (though well-developed) and more conjecture than I care for in a nonfiction book. Interesting to learn how certain events may have shaped the story of Oz (sister's death, World's fair, 1906 earthquake) Also interesting to find out that he tried to quit Oz but bankruptcy forced him back in.
kailey_luminouslibro's review
2.0
This book was too long-winded for me, and every little thing seemed to be drawn out unnecessarily. Some bits about Baum's history and his writing career were interesting, but mostly I skimmed a lot of a descriptive passages. There was a lot about the history of the times that had nothing to do with Baum, but I guess it was nice to see the historic events and trends that shaped his world. It just made the book longer though.
I wasn't particularly impressed with Baum as a person. He seems to have been rather childish and irresponsible, and stressed about money a lot; but all that could be said of almost every author ever.
He wrote a lot pot-boiler novels under various pseudonyms, but always was dragged back to Oz for more novels about Dorothy and her friends.
I didn't like that the author conjectured and guessed a lot about the origins of Baum's literary ideas. Some of it was a little far-fetched, but other times it seemed pretty obvious. For instance, I can certainly believe that since Baum lived through a drought out on the Mid-West prairie, then that influenced his writing Dorothy on a grey farm in Kansas. That's fine.
But some of the other "influences" on Baum's writing were complete guesswork.
I was mostly bored with this book, but there were a few interesting bits. Then again, biographies usually bore me, so it might just be me. I don't enjoy biographies that much.
I wasn't particularly impressed with Baum as a person. He seems to have been rather childish and irresponsible, and stressed about money a lot; but all that could be said of almost every author ever.
He wrote a lot pot-boiler novels under various pseudonyms, but always was dragged back to Oz for more novels about Dorothy and her friends.
I didn't like that the author conjectured and guessed a lot about the origins of Baum's literary ideas. Some of it was a little far-fetched, but other times it seemed pretty obvious. For instance, I can certainly believe that since Baum lived through a drought out on the Mid-West prairie, then that influenced his writing Dorothy on a grey farm in Kansas. That's fine.
But some of the other "influences" on Baum's writing were complete guesswork.
I was mostly bored with this book, but there were a few interesting bits. Then again, biographies usually bore me, so it might just be me. I don't enjoy biographies that much.
aloyokon's review
4.0
A tale about the life of the author of "The Wizard of Oz" that is as engaging and vivid as the stories he wrote.
uberbutter's review against another edition
4.0
The author of this book does a great job of intertwining what is going on in the world during the time of L. Frank Baum. This is important as the events shaped his mind when he would later write the Wizard of Oz series. It seems as if the author of this book really did her research and I appreciate that. My biggest peeve of the book is that sometimes it begins to sound more like a college dissertation instead of fun, interesting book. But besides that, job well done!
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