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Reviews and Interviews
"This fascinating, colorfully written book illuminates L. Frank Baum’s boom-and-bust story—from the crowded Finger Lakes to the parched South Dakota Territory, from Chicago’s gleaming World’s Fair to the beginnings of Hollywood. To write the ultimate American fairy tale, Baum lived a thoroughly American life. He grew up with the country but kept alive the child inside him, and us"
James Finn Garner, author of Politically Incorrect Bedtime Stories
"An original take on Baum’s evolution"
Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"Loncraine does fans of ‘Oz’ a great favor: Not only does she provide fascinating information about Baum’s amazing life […] but she also manages to put the man squarely back in his own time […] absorbing and well-paced."
Chicago Tribune
"Loncraine paints a touching portrait […] She’s capable of perceptively spotlighting things that obviously lingered in Baum’s creative memory."
Los Angeles Times
"This shrewd writer […] takes readers down erratic but flavorful byways—spiritualism, infant mortality, women’s suffrage, and the advent of electric power and the
telephone—that enrich her book’s subject. […] She’s got a knack for choosing the right detail to make routine observations sparkle."
Los Angeles magazine
"Loncraine's idiosyncratic book, with its
occasional British style, honors [the] original with a kind of
reverence that's endearing."
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
"It is a beautiful book, and adds immensely to anything and everything associated with 'The Wizard of Oz."
Theodore A. Rushton, Amazon
"The most interesting sections cover his childhood in the Finger Lakes
region of New York and his life as a storekeeper and newspaper
publisher in the Great Plains. Loncraine’s rich material includes the
ideas and folktales populating each region […] this biography should
intrigue Oz fans."
Publishers Weekly
"The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum is so much more than a simple biography of the author one of the most beloved tales of all time. It is, in fact, something of a tale of time itself.
In it, writer Rebecca Loncraine tells of pasts, presents and futures that Baum, poised at the turn of the 20th century and possessed as he was with a remarkably inspired curiosity for all things in life, not only imagined—but saw come to pass...Loncraine does an amazing job of weaving the documented life of Baum and his family—gleaned from his writing, his wife’s letters and journalistic pieces about him, a rapidly changing America and the events of the times with suppositions and conclusions about his personality and literary works. The Real Wizard of Oz is divided into sections geographically rather than chronologically (though it does follow a standard timeline as well) to better illustrate how Baum’s environment and his presence at certain events shaped the landscapes of his future creations...Reading The Real Wizard of Oz, you really get a sense of the simply amazing things a man of Baum’s era would have witnessed and the even more amazing and enduring inspiration they provided. And Loncraine has done a superb job not only of collecting them here and showing how one special man saw them with the eye of a magician, but also of transforming them into a truly absorbing and thoroughly magical account of the little man behind the little man behind the curtain."
Christel Loar, Popmatters
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