"To really write for children, you have to think like a child. And to read a children’s book, you probably have to let go of grown-up reasoning. These thoughts occurred to me as I read two newly-translated books about Tintin and his creator, Georges Remi, better known to the world as Hergé. (The pen name is composed of Remi’s initials backwards, pronounced as in French.) There is much to be learned from these studies and others by “Tintinologists”—about Hergé, about the “world” of Tintin, even about twentieth-century politics. But as I read Pierre Assouline’s well-written biography of Hergé and Jean-Marie Apostolidès’s erudite study of the Tintin books, a version of the question we Jews love to ask kept coming to mind:
Are they good for Tintin?" A review of
The Metamorphoses of Tintin or Tintin for Adults by Jean-Marie Apostolides and
Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin by Pierre Assouline at
The New Republic.
posted by ocherdraco
on Feb 4, 2010 -
17 comments
Ursula Nordstrom—the "
Maxwell Perkins of the Tot Department"—was, from 1940 to 1973, head of the Department of Books for Boys and Girls at the New York publisher Harper & Row, and until 1979 had her own imprint there, Ursula Nordstrom Books. A
legendary editor known to her authors as UN, she published the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Margaret Wise Brown, Shel Silverstein, Maurice Sendak (whom she is credited with discovering) and,
to not a little controversy, E. B. White (
previously). One of "the last generation of devoted letter writers," she wrote
nearly 100,000 during her five decade career at Harper, of which 300 of the most amusing, acerbic, and illuminating are collected in
Dear Genius by Leonard S. Marcus, the first hundred pages of which
can be read at the Harper website.
[more inside]
posted by ocherdraco
on Jan 6, 2010 -
8 comments
From October 1972 to October 1973 a controversy over
Roald Dahl's
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory simmered in the pages of
The Horn Book. It began with an article, "McLuhan, Youth, and Literature", by
Eleanor Cameron, author of the
Mushroom Planet series for children and of
The Green and Burning Tree: On the Writing and Enjoyment of Children's Books. Spread out over the
October,
December, and
February issues, it tied the ideas of
Marshall McLuhan (
The Medium is the Massage) to the confection of
Charlie, calling it "one of the most tasteless books ever written for children":
"The more I think about Charlie and the character of Willy Wonka and his factory, the more I am reminded of McLuhan’s coolness, the basic nature of his observations, and the kinds of things that excite him. Certainly there are several interesting parallels between the point of view of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and McLuhan’s 'theatrical view of experience as a production or stunt,' as well as his enthusiastic conviction that every ill of mankind can easily be solved by subservience to the senses."
What followed was a knock-down, drag-out, letter-writing brouhaha, refereed by
Horn Book editor
Paul Heins, with librarians, parents, teachers,
Ursula K. Le Guin, and
Roald Dahl himself joining in, and it was one of the main causes of the book's
revision that year.
[more inside]
posted by ocherdraco
on Oct 15, 2009 -
68 comments
