Collect The Real Wizard Of Oz: The Life And Times Of L. Frank Baum Composed By Rebecca Loncraine Visible In Softcover

grew up with the Oz books, My childhood was spent happily, not just with Dorothy and Toto and the Scarecrow and so on, but also with Tik Tok, the Woggle Bug, Princess Ozma, the Shaggy Man, Scraps, the Glass Cat, the Saw Horse, Jack Pumpkinhead, and countless others.
To this day, I can still tell you the difference between a Munchkin, a Winkie, a Gillikin, and a Quadling,

So my expectations were high going into this book, What could life have been like for the man responsible for so many wonderful characters Turns out that he was exceptional in some ways, and quite ordinary in others, much like any of us, really.
L. Frank Baum went from rags to riches and back again, He was an early photography buff, and lived to see the dawn of the electric era, automobiles, and the beginnings of the motion picture industry.
In some ways, he was the J, K. Rowling of the earlys, The Oz books were wildly popular, There was even a successful stage musical based on the first book,

Rebecca Loncraine has done a masterful job of bringing history to life, There is so much telling detail in the settings and the events that were taking place in the world at the time, Baum was an early supporter of women's rightsindeed, his motherinlaw was Matilda Gage, one of the founding figures in the American women's suffrage movement,

Although most people familiar with Oz know it from the MGM movie rather than the books, Loncraine deals with the film's debut in passing.
There are two main reasons for this, First, the story of the movie has been covered in exhaustive detail in numerous books already, And second, Baum died in, twenty years before the movie was released, though his widow was present at the premiere, True, there are significant differences between the book and the movie, but both are wonderful in their own way,

Although it's been ages since I read any of the Oz books, they live strongly in my memory, It was definitely an interesting and rewarding experience to get to know the man who wrote them, This is a fine book, and it is highly recommended, Kind of reads like a book report at times and makes a lot of assumptions, but still good, A lukewarmish biography about "the man behind the curtain" of the Oz books, Thoroughly documented and meticulously researched, but badly overwritten in places to the point of tedium, .

The first few chapters are a semicoherent mishmash of infant mortality, dead cousins, the Civil War, Spiritism, Old World fairy tales, and failed family business ventures.
These all factor into Baum's storytelling, But the author spends a disproportionately large amount of time in these woods, frequently repeating herself and/or circling back to ground previously covered, Talk about redundant. And dull as a box of rocks,

Additionally, the author seems overeager to unload her truckload of research, So instead of picking and choosing what's relevant and what's not, she dumps the whole load on the reader and squashes them flat, Does anyone really care how the horse barn at Rose Lawn was appointed

I had high hopes for this book, But so much of it is just plain boring, It's a snoozefest. I had to force myself to finish this thing, There's also too much guesswork by the author on Baum's early years and she has a tendency to draw conclusions that seem flimsy or forced.


A wellresearched but rather tedious biog, An interesting subject but not a great read, The biography was longwinded with too much conjecture, It was an interesting read, The insight into Baum's life and the ups and downs and how he came to write The Wizard of Oz was fascinating to learn about.
To find that he wrote even more was great, Would recommend it to anyone who enjoys

the Wizard of Oz, One of my new favorites, Loncraine's biography of L. Frank Baum brings him and the times he lived back to life, I knew he wrote the 'Wizard of Oz' and several other Oz related books, but didn't know anything about the man, After watching "Oz the Great and Powerful", starring James Franco, I wanted to find out more about Baum and added this book to my reading list.


Baum became so many incarnations in hisyears, its hard to fathom that most of it is in this book! Actor, playwright, theater manager, store owner, newspaper publisher/editor, journalist, traveling salesman, advocate for women's suffrage, early expert on design of department store window displays, and a father to four boys.
I'm sure I left something out, I found the beginning a little slow describing his parent's and associated family life in early upstate New York, and thankfully a family tree of the members mentioned in the book is included.
Loncraine does an excellent job of placing the reader in Baum's travels to New York City, the plains of the Dakota Territories, Chicago, and early Hollywood.
My favorite is her description of the Chicago World Fair of, The author also gives summaries of his writingsamazing how much he produced, Fourteen Oz related books, and fortyone other novels under various pen names, The book ends with the production of's 'Wizard of Oz', and it's premier at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, My only disappointment is that the book did not include any photographs,

Loncraine did a a tremendous amount of research for this book, including spending a summer in New York , and traveling to the Dakotas.
Sadly, Loncraine died of cancer at the age ofending a short remarkable career as a writer, Her book 'Skybound' chronicling her battle with cancer, and her new experiences as a glider pilot was published posthumously, "Stunt, dwarf, or destroy the imagination of a child and you have taken away its chances of success in life, Imagination transforms the commonplace into the great and creates the new out of the old, " L. Frank Baum


I LOVED this book, I love anything "Wizard of Oz, " The author gave me a great insight into the life and mind of L, Frank Baum. I think she did a great job with this book, A seriously wonderful look back on Baum's life and career, A little wordy at times but very educational on both Baum's life and what was going on in the world around him, If you love Oz as much as I do, you'll love this book, This book was too longwinded 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 potboiler 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 farfetched, but other times it seemed pretty obvious, For instance, I can certainly believe that since Baum lived through a drought out on the MidWest 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, Off to see the Wizard

Very interesting read! It was Fun to learn about the man behind the story, Very well researched and well written, L. Frank Baum sure had an interesting life, but Loncraine goes a bit too far for this to be a good literary biography, My biggest takeaway is a better understanding of Baum's varied living places, He wrote the first Oz book in Chicago, and I never made the Chicago connection with him, There's now a Yellow Brick Road built in Humboldt Park, where he lived when he wrote that book,

We are treated to the histories of Baum's extended family members, the local seance scene in his hometown before he was born, and treatises on "the abolitionist North" ha and the Civil War, before we get to, you know, the real wizard of Oz.
It's a fine line in biography between establishing the subject's world and remaining faithful to the subject as subject, I wondered at times if I was reading a history of America through the life of Baum and interpretation of the British Loncraine, or if this was the actual "life and times of L.
Frank Baum. "

Baum did have a very interesting family, particularly his motherinlaw, Matilda Joslyn Gage, was known around the world for her views on women's rights and antireligious sentiments.
His life did span a time of great change and upheaval in America, and he was involved with various schemes that mirrored American projects, from Hollywood to the Columbian Exposition.
But all of that cluttered up the biography, mostly due to the way Loncraine handled it, She inserted her own imaginations and conjectures into the biography, undermining her authority where is the line between fact and fiction and refusing to cite quotations and specific information, making it nearly impossible for the reader to track down interesting rabbit trails.
Sure, a lengthy works cited is proffered, but there are so many sources that anyone interested would have to do the level of research Loncraine did to find what they wanted.


Overall, this was still an interesting book, It just failed in its task of being "the first major literary biography of L, Frank Baum. " The first Well, I guess, Literary biography If imagining the Chicago wind circling Baum as he writes, "With This Pencil, I wrote the MS of The Emerald City" counts as literary biography, sure, but after reading wellcited literary biographies like Uglow's Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, I have to say this one fails in the task.


For nonacademic readers, this is an interesting look at Baum's life story and the vagaries of the times in which he lived, For researchers, plumb the works cited and keep moving, Loncraine can't decide between creative writing and biography, and I wonder if she would have been better served by writing biofiction about Baum, All this being said, Loncraine captures the spirit of Oz, the magic of Baum's created world, and the spark that has flamed in many childhood imaginations for over one hundred years.
This is a biography for the fans of Oz, if not for the academic, which makes it worth reading for plenty of folks, I don't feel my time was wasted, but I do feel that my taste for literary biography was disappointed, Yet, after reading this, I long to pick up an Oz book again and get swept away with Dorothy Gale, The Dainty China Country is aesthetic and I miss it, And who am I to say that, rather than a meticulously charted look at Baum's life, this longing is not Loncraine's goal I enjoyed listening to this book.
I learned a lot about L Frank Baum, the author of "The Wizard of Oz" series of books, I wanted to love this book, It was on the shelf at the library, and I just grabbed it on a whim, It was an interesting read, for sure, but there were a couple of glaring problems with it that continued to make me roll my eyes and sigh.


The main problem was that the author perpetually made assumptions about the subject, L, Frank Baum. She specially did so during the first half of the book, which covered years that were probably understandably difficult to find material about, But this is supposed to be a Biography! The author can't just thrown in heavily veiled sentences as though they were fact!

For one example, the author described the estate that Baum grew up on for much of his childhood and teen years.
The famous Plank Road ran behind it, She says that "Baum would have see the Plank Road curving north, The sixteenmile toll road, built in, was the first plank road in America, The planks became worn, cracked, and rutted from the extreme weather and use, and the old planks frequently had to be replaced, Fresh hemlock is a light yellowish color when new planks were laid, the famous Plank Road would have curved, like a yellow band, through the countryside north of the estate.
" Now, the author never comes out and says that this is what inspired Baum to write about the "Yellow Brick Road," but she implies it, quite forcefully.
And she makes similar statements throughout the book,

The other thing that I felt was wrong with the book is her constant side stories, Actually, it's more of a doubleegdged sword, I LOVED most of her side stories they were all about really interesting things that were going on around the country and the world at the same time as Baum's stories.
I really enjoyed learning more about all sorts of things, The PROBLEM came when she tried to connect Baum to these other events, I felt like she was pulling whatever she could from the air to make Baum a part of these other events, even though there was never a relation.


For one example, she tells how Baum, as a teenager, is a voracious reader and especially loves to read anything by Charles Dickens.
Then she launches on a side story about Dickens, how he grew up, how he would give dramatic readings and chargefor a ticket, and other very interesting tidbits.
But then she tries to make more of a connection by saying that Dickens gave a reading in the neighboring town when Baum wasyears old.
She says that she doesn't know if he went to the reading, but that he would certainly have known about it,

For what it's worth, I did enjoy reading the book, I would recommend it to anyone who would like to learn more about a lot of different little things, rather than a factual account of L.
Frank Baum. This book is the biography of Wizard of Oz creator, L, Frank Baum. I very much enjoyed this book, I found Baums life extremely thoughtprovoking and as I read the book I found that I was routing him on! The book is enhanced by eight pages of photos I wish there were more that added a personal glimpse into Baums biography.


I have read that some of the books other reviewers did not like how much of the book was devoted to what was happening around Baum, i.
e. thoughts and customs of the time in which he lived, But I found this added information very relevant to the biography, For example, if you read a story about a boy that wanted to explore the universe, it would be very important to know if they grew up in thess dreaming of being a spaceman like Flash and Buck, or in thess dreaming of being an astronaut like Neil and Buzz.
Likewise, L. Frank Baum grew up in a time that greatly affected his stories, I think the author used the proper mix of personal story and American history to form the perfect blend!
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