E-book edition of 'Fahrenheit 451' released

By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

Try to burn this version of Fahrenheit 451.

Publisher Simon & Schuster today releases the first e-book edition of Ray Bradbury's classic 1953 novel set in a future where reading is outlawed and firefighters burn books.

In print, the novel has sold more than 10 million copies, been translated into 33 languages and remains a standard in high school English classes.

A graphic novel version, illustrated by Tim Hamilton, with an introduction by Bradbury, was released in 2009.

Francois Truffaut directed the 1966 movie adaptation, his only English-language film, staring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie.

In announcing the new publishing agreement that covers digital rights, Simon & Schuster's Jonathan Karp called it was a "wonderful opportunity" to bring the novel "to new generation of readers and in new formats."

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Review-a-Day for Thu, Sep 1: Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Signed Edition

by Alexandra Fuller A review by Sarah Cypher

Alexandra Fuller returns to the African landscape in her memoir, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness. It accepts the curious task of being both a prequel and a sequel to her 2001 debut, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood. With a love of landscape, a historian's lens and a knack for laugh-out-loud satire aimed at her mother's narcissism, Fuller tells the broader story of her family's participation in the Rhodesian civil war.

Fuller's mother is a "one million percent Scottish" descendant of ancestors to whom "land is good; blood-soaked land is better; and land soaked in the blood of one's ancestors is best." The sentiment seems odd, though, when we see the fervor with which Nicola embraces Africa, and later defends her part of it with an Uzi. She thinks of herself as "Nicola Fuller of Central Africa," a designation repeated so often that it becomes a humorous refrain. It is typical of the memoir's humor, in fact, rising from the author's sustained shock at her mother's gauche, imperial attitudes: Nicola behaves "as if she were a third-person participant in a movie starring herself, a perfect horse and a flawless equatorial light. The violence and the injustices that came with colonialism seem -- in my mother's version of events -- to have happened in some other unwatched movie, to some other unwatched people."

In widening its angle, Cocktail Hour transcends a criticism that Dogs, by being limited to a child's perspective, went too soft on colonial racism. Fuller tackles the curious tension between the two narratives: Nicola's skewed version of her place in history, and the self-aware memoir that encompasses Nicola and the simmering conflicts that erupted across Africa as colonies became nations. What unites the two narratives is a fierce love of land. Neither succumbing to white self-hatred nor stooping to colonial apologia, Fuller begins to explore the crumbly moral ground of being attached to a place that does not belong to you. She writes about the inevitable negotiation of belonging, the claims and counterclaims on land, the cultural and personal memories at stake, and the debts paid in work and blood.

Like the rest of Rhodesians, the Fuller family found itself on the wrong side of history, but in losing the war, a series of farms and three of five children, they tell a complex story of adaptation and reconciliation. Fuller reminds us what peace actually looks like. It is not the silent peace of an absolute victory, but the humble and constant negotiation of one existence among others.

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Review-a-Day for Fri, Sep 2: Retromania Signed Edition

by Simon Reynolds A review by Nicholas Carr

"Who wants yesterday's papers?" sang Mick Jagger in 1967. "Who wants yesterday's girl?" The answer, in the Swinging 60s, was obvious: "Nobody in the world." That was then. Now we seem to want nothing more than to read yesterday's papers and carry on with yesterday's girl. Popular culture has become obsessed with the past -- with recycling it, rehashing it, replaying it. Though we live in a fast-forward age, we cannot take our finger off the rewind button.

Nowhere is the past's grip so tight as in the world of music, as the rock critic Simon Reynolds meticulously documents in Retromania. Over the last two decades, he argues, the "exploratory impulse" that once powered pop music forward has shifted its focus from Now to Then. Fans and musicians alike have turned into archeologists. The evidence is everywhere. There are the reunion tours and the reissues, the box sets and the tribute albums. There are the R&B museums, the rock halls of fame, the punk libraries. There are the collectors of vinyl and cassettes and -- God help us -- eight-tracks. There are the remixes, the mash-ups, the samples. There are the "curated" playlists. When pop shakes its moneymaker today, what rises is the dust of the archive.

Nostalgia is nothing new. It has been a refrain of art and literature at least since Homer set Odysseus on Calypso's island and had him yearn to turn back time. And popular music has always had a strong revivalist streak, particularly in Reynolds's native Britain. But retromania is not just about nostalgia. It goes deeper than the tie-dyed dreams of Baby Boomers or the gray-flecked mohawks of Gen X punks. Whereas nostalgia is rooted in a sense of the past as past, retromania stems from a sense of the past as present. Yesterday's music, in all its forms, has become the atmosphere of contemporary culture. We live, Reynolds remarks, in "a simultaneity of pop time that abolishes history while nibbling away at the present's own sense of itself as an era with a distinct identity and feel."

One reason is the sheer quantity of pop music that has accumulated over the past half century. Whether it is rock, funk, country, or electronica, we have heard it all before. Even the edgiest musicians have little choice but to produce pastiche. Greatly amplifying the effect is the recent shift to producing and distributing songs as digital files. When kids had to fork out cash for records or CDs, they had to make hard choices about what they listened to and what they let pass by. Usually, they would choose the new over the old, which served to keep the past at bay. Now, thanks to freely traded MP3s and all-you-can-eat music services such as Spotify, there is no need to make choices. Pretty much any song ever recorded is just a click away. With the economic barrier removed, the old floods in, swamping the new.

Reynolds argues that the glut of tunes has not just changed what we listen to; it has also changed how we listen. The rapt fan who knew every hook, lyric, and lead by heart has been replaced by the fickle dabbler who cannot stop hitting 'Next'. Reynolds presents himself as a case in point, and his experience will sound familiar to anyone with a hard drive packed with music files. He was initially "captivated" by the ability to use a computer to navigate an ocean of tunes. But in short order he found himself more interested in "the mechanism" than the music: "Soon I was listening to just the first fifteen seconds of every track; then, not listening at all." The logical culmination, he writes, "would have been for me to remove the headphones and just look at the track display."

Given a choice between more and less, we all choose more, even if it means a loss of sensory and emotional engagement. Though we don't like to admit it, the digital music revolution has merely confirmed what we have always known: we cherish what is scarce, and what is abundant we view as disposable. Reynolds quotes another music writer, Karla Starr: "I find myself getting bored even in the middle of songs simply because I can."

As all time is compressed into the present moment, our recycling becomes ever more compulsive. We begin to plunder not just bygone eras but also the immediate past. Over the course of the last decade, writes Reynolds, "the interval between something happening and its being revisited seemed to shrink insidiously." Not only did we have 1960s revivals and 70s revivals and 80s revivals, but we even began to see revivals of musical fashions from the 90s, such as shoegaze and Britpop. It sometimes seems that the reason things go out of fashion so quickly these days is because we cannot wait for them to come back into fashion. Displaying enthusiasm for something new is socially risky, particularly in an ironical time. It is safer to wait for it to come around again, preferably bearing the "vintage" label.

For musicians themselves, the danger is that their art becomes disconnected from the present -- "timeless" in a bad sense. The eras of greatest ferment and creativity in popular music, such as the mid-60s and the late 70s, were times of social discontent, when the young rejected the past and its stifling traditions. Providing the soundtrack for rebellion, rock musicians felt compelled to slay their fathers rather than pay tribute to them. Even if their lyrics were about getting laid or getting high -- as they frequently were -- their songs were filled with political force. Those not busy being born, as Dylan put it shortly after taking an axe to his folkie roots, are busy dying.

Now, youth culture is largely apolitical, and pop's soundtrack is just a soundtrack. Those not busy being born are busy listening to their iPods. Whether it's Fleet Foxes or Friendly Fires, Black Angels or Beach House, today's bands are less likely to battle the past than to luxuriate in it. This is not to say they aren't good bands. As Reynolds is careful to note, there is plenty of fine pop music being made today, in an ear-boggling array of styles. But drained of its subversive energies, none of it matters much. It just streams by.

Retromania is an important and often compelling work, but it is also a sprawling one. Its aesthetic is more Sandinista! than "Hey Ya!" But Reynolds is sharp, and he knows his stuff. Even when his narrative gets lost in the details, the details remain interesting. (I didn't know, for instance, that the rave scene of the early 90s had its origins in the trad-jazz fad that preceded Beatlemania in England.) Reynolds might also be accused of being something of a retromaniac himself. After all, in worrying about the enervating influence of the past, he echoes the complaints of earlier cultural critics. "Our age is retrospective," grumbled Emerson in 1836. "Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?" Longing for a less nostalgic time is itself a form of nostalgia.

But Reynolds makes a convincing case that today's retromania is different in degree and in kind from anything we've experienced before. And it is not just an affliction of the mainstream. It has also warped the perspective of the avant-garde, dulling culture's cutting edge. It's one thing for old folks to look backwards. It's another thing -- and a far more lamentable one -- for young people to feed on the past. Somebody needs to figure out a new way to smash a guitar.

Nicholas Carr is the author, most recently, of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

Since 1914, The New Republic has provided its readers with an intelligent and rigorous examination of American culture and politics. At TNR, books, art, film, architecture, theater, dance, and poetry all invite the reader to indulge in the highest levels of aesthetic experience. Subscribe to TNR today for access to literary reviews, pop-culture essays, and nearly a century of writing from the best minds in culture and the arts. Powell's Books customers can save 70% off the newsstand price!

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Review-a-Day for Thu, Jun 16: The Murder of the Century Signed Edition

by Paul Collins A review by Marc Mohan

A common complaint about journalism is that it focuses on the sordid, gruesome and melodramatic at the expense of "legitimate" reporting. Of course, this gripe is nothing new, as even a glance at the "yellow" journalism of more than a century ago reveals.

When William Randolph Hearst revolutionized the newspaper business in the 1890s, he did so by appealing to the same voyeuristic impulses that keep Nancy Grace on the air. He also left a colorful, detailed first draft of history, one Paul Collins draws upon to great effect in The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars.

Though less notorious these days than the gruesome exploits of Chicago serial killer H.H. Holmes (as related in Erik Larson's bestseller The Devil in the White City) or the high-society 1906 murder of architect Stanford White, the killing of William Guldensuppe was the talk of the town during summer and fall 1897 in New York.

The tale begins with the discovery of a parcel containing a headless, legless, mutilated torso floating in the East River; soon another package holding the abdomen and upper legs was discovered in Harlem. Initial suspicion that the gory bits were the work of mischievous medical students gave way to the reality of murder.

It was the sort of sensational story Hearst's New York Journal thrived on, and, especially early in the case, reporters uncovered just as many, if not more, clues than an overworked, unsophisticated police force. (These were the early days of forensic science before fingerprinting was in use in America.) The intense rivalry between the Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's New York World drove them to extremes of investigative journalism and blatant puffery. But it's arguable the crime may never have been solved without their efforts.

Collins, a Portland State University professor and the "literary detective" on NPR's "Weekend Edition," has skillfully utilized contemporary articles, as well as later memoirs by participants, to craft a dialogue-heavy, richly detailed book that reads like a novel and yet maintains a strict fidelity to the facts. (Of course, this is to assume that the quotes he lifts weren't simply invented by Hearst's or Pulitzer's ambitious scribes.) A grab-bag of colorful factoids leaps off the page -- you'll learn the origins of both the term "the third degree" and the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog.

The Murder of the Century isn't a case of history with a moral. It won't alter your perception of the past or bring to light some long-buried social injustice. It's simply a fantastic, factual yarn, and a reminder that abhorrent violence is nothing new under the sun -- Guldensuppe's killer(s) hold their own against any of today's monsters. If there's a greater significance to the case, it's found in the rise of Hearst's tabloid empire. About the only thing that could shove this sensational murder trial off the Journal's front page were Hearst's efforts at prodding America into the Spanish-American War; it seems that, as Collins puts it, "The Guldensuppe case had paved the way for his paper to take it upon itself to shove aside any government, local or national, that moved too slowly to satisfy a pressroom deadline."

The Oregonian is the online source for comprehensive coverage of the Northwest literary scene. Its daily books report includes news, reviews, and poetry, as well as essays and opinions from local authors.

Plus: The paper's award-winning books section, published on Sundays, strips the buzz from national bestsellers and directs readers to little-known regional gems in a concise package.

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Review-a-Day for Fri, Jun 3: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: 100th Anniversary Edition (Books of Wonder)

by L. Frank Baum A review by Ellen Handler Spitz

Although details have not yet been released, the Los Angeles Times reported last year that preliminary plans are in the works for an upcoming movie of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. By midsummer this year, the Harry Potter film series will have run its course, and what better way to fill the gap than by taking up Baum's set of Oz books (this is the first), with its cast of zany characters including a princess who undergoes a sex change and a legion of splendidly garbed humanoids whose limbs end in wheels instead of hands and feet? I disagree with Salman Rushdie's elevation of the iconic and justly well-loved 1939 film, the Judy Garland one, over the original Baum text. This text -- literary, philosophical, and brilliant -- merits priority.

Notwithstanding the whirlwind of adaptations, adulterations, dramatizations, spin-offs, ad-ons, pop-ups, memorabilia, and kitsch that have spiraled throughout the century since its original publication by George M. Hill in 1900 (with illustrations by W.W. Denslow), the original masterpiece survives and defies its would-be re-fashioners. Do we know why? Reading it again and trying to recall how turning its pages felt to me years ago as a child growing up in New York, I realized one would need a cloak of invisibility so as to slink past that angel with the flaming sword.

The book drops you, rubbing your eyes, into a mysterious ether -- onto shifting sands (recall the "Deadly Desert") -- into oneiric realms, where you lose yourself and wander, enchanted: "The cyclone had set the house down, very gently... in the midst of a country of marvelous beauty...." "The road to the City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick..." "I am Oz, the Great and Terrible. Who are you, and why do you seek me?" Charmed sentences follow one another like dance steps along the winding road itself. Yet few readers have focused on the book's prodigious mental adventures.

But first: Dorothy, whose shoes, in the pages of Baum's story, are silver, not ruby-red, appears before us not as a puppet but as a believable child. Denslow's line drawings make her out to be no more than six. Who can fail to admire her for slapping the roaring lion's nose while telling him to be ashamed of himself for trying to bite Toto? And for chastising the Wicked Witch who trips her and steals one of her silver shoes? And for steadfastly denouncing the less-than-candid Wizard and calling his bluff? Kind, gentle, honest, and loyal to her friends, Dorothy is endowed with Aristotelian virtue, with genuine heroism. Some interpreters pretend she grows up along the way so that, by the end, she comes to accept her dull Kansas home with aplomb. But Baum keeps her a little girl from start to finish. Aunt Em asks her on the last page where she has come from. One adverb reveals all: "'From the Land of Oz,' said Dorothy gravely."

Beyond this -- beyond magic, fantasy, and psychological verisimilitude -- Baum brings to his pages a plenitude of intellectual puzzles. Subtly and with great charm, he explores in children's terms the realms of ontology, epistemology, and ethics. He actually helps children learn to think. The philosopher Gareth Matthews, in Philosophy and the Young Child, points especially to the Tin Woodman. This character may trouble children, who cringe inwardly at the thought of limbs being chopped off and cannot help wondering whether they could still be themselves if their parts were replaced. In a similar way, Matthews observed, Plutarch recounted the ancient paradox of the ship of Theseus, which, on display at Athens, had its planks supplanted when, one after another, they rotted away, until the entire ship was replaced, whereupon, the question arose as to whether what was now on display could still be deemed the ship of Theseus. Even a young child can thus grasp the power of Baum's metaphor. A welter of complex emotions arises when we cannot hold fast to a stable and continuous identity.

Dorothy and her readers learn similarly from encounters with the Lion. After she slaps his nose and he withdraws weeping (and, in Denslow's illustration, wiping his tears away with his tail), she asks him what makes him a coward: this is a child's quintessentially philosophical question. The Lion answers that it is a mystery: he was born that way. But when the Tin Woodman intervenes to suppose that, since the Lion's heart beats so fast when he is afraid, maybe he is suffering from a heart disease, the Lion responds meditatively: "Perhaps ... if I had no heart I should not be a coward." It is easy to miss the gravity of this line.

Later in the same scene, Dorothy makes an observation to the Lion that all the other beasts in the forest must be more cowardly than he, since they allow him to scare them so easily. To which, the Lion replies: "They really are ... but that doesn't make me any braver." Thus Baum asks to us to consider whether virtue may be a matter of absolute rather than relative standards: a sophisticated idea for a children's book. His Lion wants to feel his bravery on his own terms.

Toward the story's end, the Wizard's actions raise serious questions in the domain of ethics. Dorothy, now bitterly disappointed and justifiably angry at the apparently fierce, chameleon-like Wizard for his failure to keep his promises to her and her friends (even though they have fulfilled his demand and have destroyed the Wicked Witch of the West) tells him he is "a very bad man." He answers her by saying that in fact he is really a very good man but a very bad wizard. This answer, as the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle might have pointed out, is a category mistake. Whereas, Dorothy is speaking of goodness in a moral sense, the Wizard is referring to badness or incompetence in a purely technical sense.

Later in the story, after the hot air balloon has burst its strings and ascended, leaving Dorothy stranded in Oz with Toto, and the Wizard has vanished beyond the clouds, Dorothy, despite her disillusionment and remorse, absolves the Wizard and forgives him. She says that, after all, he was a good man, even though he was truly a bad Wizard. She does this with the thoughtful justification that "he had done his best." Thus, Dorothy -- wise child -- helps sort out the category confusion by intuitively grasping that, whereas, in ethics, intention is central to our judgment of what is good and what is not and must be taken into account, in the realm of action we weigh results, quite apart from intention. Wanting to do well does not carry the same weight as wanting to do good.

Another philosophical theme: Dorothy's three friends, as we realize almost from the start of their journey, possess unawares the boons they seek from Oz. By employing this conceit -- the "brainless" Scarecrow, for example, turns out to be the one who conceives the ingenious idea of chopping down a tree to make a bridge across the gulf they must cross in order to escape the ferocious Kalidahs -- Baum asks us to ponder the value of self-knowledge and self-awareness. He makes us reflect on the relevance of these capacities in education and in other spheres of life and, indeed, in any pilgrimage that can be conceived as an adventure along a yellow brick road. He treats here, in his way, the theme made famous by Eliot's luminous lines from The Four Quartets, penned over forty years later: "We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time."

Dorothy's direct interactions with the Wicked Witch also prove highly instructive. Seeing the mark made by the protective kiss on her forehead, the Witch backs off, for, as Baum writes, the Power of Good is greater than the Power of Evil. But, undaunted in her malevolence, the Witch persists with her scheming and cleverly concludes that, since Dorothy does not know how to use her power, or even understand that she has power, she can still be enslaved. Once again Baum opens our eyes to the tremendous value of self-knowledge. The narrative circles back again and again to the ancient Greek adage, thought to have been inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: "Know thyself." And reflecting on that, we perceive its intimate connection with the problem of identity and with, therefore, the ship of Theseus.

The question of merit, and the meaning of merit, also echoes throughout Oz. After the friends reach the Emerald City at last, the Wizard asks Dorothy why he should help her, and she answers touchingly: "Because you are strong and I am weak; because you are a Great Wizard and I am only a helpless little girl." These words ring with the logic of youth -- a small child, by virtue of her being, deserves nurturance, protection, and gratification. Babies are unconditionally loved. We ask nothing of them. Yet as they grow older, rules ensue, and merit rears its head. "In this country," the Wizard replies to Dorothy, "everyone must pay for everything he gets." Similarly, to the Scarecrow, he repeats, "I never grant favors without some return." These interviews occur, moreover, at the precise midpoint of the book. They highlight a significant milestone in the learning process.

It may be too much to hope that a new movie of Oz directed by Sam Raimi will try to convey any of this intellectual richness. Yet beyond spreading color, invention, and enchantment, L. Frank Baum's masterpiece remains a literary work that inspires children to think; its well-worn printed pages and its quaint pictures open onto serious and expansive vistas of mental excursion.

Ellen Handler Spitz is the Honors College Professor at the University of Maryland (UMBC). Her latest book is Illuminating Childhood.

Since 1914, The New Republic has provided its readers with an intelligent and rigorous examination of American culture and politics. At TNR, books, art, film, architecture, theater, dance, and poetry all invite the reader to indulge in the highest levels of aesthetic experience. Subscribe to TNR today for access to literary reviews, pop-culture essays, and nearly a century of writing from the best minds in culture and the arts. Powell's Books customers can save 70% off the newsstand price!

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Review-a-Day for Sun, May 22: The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt Signed Edition

by Jon-Jon Goulian A review by Dan Kois

Back in 1976, a 7-year-old boy named Jon-Jon Goulian wrote himself a postcard. He gave his postman strict instructions to arrange for the letter to be delivered 30 years later, to his grandfather's summer home in Vermont. As it happens, grownup Jon-Jon was in Vermont the day his directive was carried out, and received a message from his pint-sized self.

Young Jon-Jon mostly wanted to know whether Older Jon-Jon had blossomed into a pro soccer player. He didn't think to ask whether his future self would disappoint his parents, reshape his body with multiple nose jobs and countless hours at the gym, or wear skirts and lip gloss every day. In his very funny but frustratingly shallow memoir, The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt, Goulian tries to explain to himself -- and to us -- just what happened.

Goulian describes his memoir as "a deep and painful stab at self-analysis," but that's misleading. An inveterate partygoer on the Manhattan literary scene, Goulian writes with a chatty, engaging voice that's more suitable for bons mots than for soul-searching. And a lot of those mots are really bons; he's particularly funny when describing a childhood diet of nonfat, dry-curd cottage cheese and textured vegetable protein. Once a year, Goulian got to eat bacon, which he aptly describes as "almost too delicious to take seriously."

Goulian offers plenty of possible explanations for how he became the person he is: a distant mother, two successful older brothers, even a teenage inguinal hernia that left him cripplingly shy about his body. But he seems to lack the ability -- or perhaps just the interest -- to do the most important job of a memoirist: to create empathy, to help the reader feel what it's like to be the person he is.

In part, that's because Goulian never achieves the delicacy of tone that might suggest a sense of perspective. Goulian's despair for his confused younger self is, at times, touching. Elsewhere, the hysteria with which he details his neuroses seems more befitting the callow lost boy he's describing than the 40-year-old telling the story. Take the blinkered section in which he explains why, as a college sophomore, he moved to a dorm at Barnard, Columbia's sister school, and goes a bit off the rails:

Just as a Jew in Italy during World War II would have gladly sought refuge in the Vatican, not because he was a Catholic but because he didn't want to be carted off to Auschwitz by the Germans, so did I seek refuge at Barnard for no reason other than to hide.

In the end, what's most vivid about The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt isn't the outrageous shell Goulian has donned as a kind of armor against the world. Instead, it's the realization that the storytelling David Sedaris, for example, so expertly carries off -- the tempering of brutal honesty (or at least the illusion of it) with perspective and laughter -- is not at all effortless. It's hard work that requires follow-through.

As Goulian makes clear throughout his book, he isn't much for follow-through. A proud dilettante, he attended law school and clerked for a judge, then skipped the bar. He worked as Robert Silvers' assistant at the New York Review of Books, only to leave, he says, when Silvers reminded him too much of his father.

He describes himself, during one of many fallow periods, as waiting "for something magical to happen." And, in a twist that doesn't make it into these pages, something magical did happen: He was paid a reported $700,000 to write this very book. You won't begrudge Goulian that advance; in fact, you'll almost certainly enjoy The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt, especially if you treat it less like a memoir and more like a collection of well-honed cocktail-party stories from the guest around whom everyone naturally gathers. Like party chatter, Goulian's book is daring but not revealing, sparkling with wit but never quite believable. He may be a real character, but he's not a real character. This Is NPR
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Review-a-Day for Fri, Jun 3: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: 100th Anniversary Edition (Books of Wonder)

by L. Frank Baum A review by Ellen Handler Spitz

Although details have not yet been released, the Los Angeles Times reported last year that preliminary plans are in the works for an upcoming movie of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. By midsummer this year, the Harry Potter film series will have run its course, and what better way to fill the gap than by taking up Baum's set of Oz books (this is the first), with its cast of zany characters including a princess who undergoes a sex change and a legion of splendidly garbed humanoids whose limbs end in wheels instead of hands and feet? I disagree with Salman Rushdie's elevation of the iconic and justly well-loved 1939 film, the Judy Garland one, over the original Baum text. This text -- literary, philosophical, and brilliant -- merits priority.

Notwithstanding the whirlwind of adaptations, adulterations, dramatizations, spin-offs, ad-ons, pop-ups, memorabilia, and kitsch that have spiraled throughout the century since its original publication by George M. Hill in 1900 (with illustrations by W.W. Denslow), the original masterpiece survives and defies its would-be re-fashioners. Do we know why? Reading it again and trying to recall how turning its pages felt to me years ago as a child growing up in New York, I realized one would need a cloak of invisibility so as to slink past that angel with the flaming sword.

The book drops you, rubbing your eyes, into a mysterious ether -- onto shifting sands (recall the "Deadly Desert") -- into oneiric realms, where you lose yourself and wander, enchanted: "The cyclone had set the house down, very gently... in the midst of a country of marvelous beauty...." "The road to the City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick..." "I am Oz, the Great and Terrible. Who are you, and why do you seek me?" Charmed sentences follow one another like dance steps along the winding road itself. Yet few readers have focused on the book's prodigious mental adventures.

But first: Dorothy, whose shoes, in the pages of Baum's story, are silver, not ruby-red, appears before us not as a puppet but as a believable child. Denslow's line drawings make her out to be no more than six. Who can fail to admire her for slapping the roaring lion's nose while telling him to be ashamed of himself for trying to bite Toto? And for chastising the Wicked Witch who trips her and steals one of her silver shoes? And for steadfastly denouncing the less-than-candid Wizard and calling his bluff? Kind, gentle, honest, and loyal to her friends, Dorothy is endowed with Aristotelian virtue, with genuine heroism. Some interpreters pretend she grows up along the way so that, by the end, she comes to accept her dull Kansas home with aplomb. But Baum keeps her a little girl from start to finish. Aunt Em asks her on the last page where she has come from. One adverb reveals all: "'From the Land of Oz,' said Dorothy gravely."

Beyond this -- beyond magic, fantasy, and psychological verisimilitude -- Baum brings to his pages a plenitude of intellectual puzzles. Subtly and with great charm, he explores in children's terms the realms of ontology, epistemology, and ethics. He actually helps children learn to think. The philosopher Gareth Matthews, in Philosophy and the Young Child, points especially to the Tin Woodman. This character may trouble children, who cringe inwardly at the thought of limbs being chopped off and cannot help wondering whether they could still be themselves if their parts were replaced. In a similar way, Matthews observed, Plutarch recounted the ancient paradox of the ship of Theseus, which, on display at Athens, had its planks supplanted when, one after another, they rotted away, until the entire ship was replaced, whereupon, the question arose as to whether what was now on display could still be deemed the ship of Theseus. Even a young child can thus grasp the power of Baum's metaphor. A welter of complex emotions arises when we cannot hold fast to a stable and continuous identity.

Dorothy and her readers learn similarly from encounters with the Lion. After she slaps his nose and he withdraws weeping (and, in Denslow's illustration, wiping his tears away with his tail), she asks him what makes him a coward: this is a child's quintessentially philosophical question. The Lion answers that it is a mystery: he was born that way. But when the Tin Woodman intervenes to suppose that, since the Lion's heart beats so fast when he is afraid, maybe he is suffering from a heart disease, the Lion responds meditatively: "Perhaps ... if I had no heart I should not be a coward." It is easy to miss the gravity of this line.

Later in the same scene, Dorothy makes an observation to the Lion that all the other beasts in the forest must be more cowardly than he, since they allow him to scare them so easily. To which, the Lion replies: "They really are ... but that doesn't make me any braver." Thus Baum asks to us to consider whether virtue may be a matter of absolute rather than relative standards: a sophisticated idea for a children's book. His Lion wants to feel his bravery on his own terms.

Toward the story's end, the Wizard's actions raise serious questions in the domain of ethics. Dorothy, now bitterly disappointed and justifiably angry at the apparently fierce, chameleon-like Wizard for his failure to keep his promises to her and her friends (even though they have fulfilled his demand and have destroyed the Wicked Witch of the West) tells him he is "a very bad man." He answers her by saying that in fact he is really a very good man but a very bad wizard. This answer, as the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle might have pointed out, is a category mistake. Whereas, Dorothy is speaking of goodness in a moral sense, the Wizard is referring to badness or incompetence in a purely technical sense.

Later in the story, after the hot air balloon has burst its strings and ascended, leaving Dorothy stranded in Oz with Toto, and the Wizard has vanished beyond the clouds, Dorothy, despite her disillusionment and remorse, absolves the Wizard and forgives him. She says that, after all, he was a good man, even though he was truly a bad Wizard. She does this with the thoughtful justification that "he had done his best." Thus, Dorothy -- wise child -- helps sort out the category confusion by intuitively grasping that, whereas, in ethics, intention is central to our judgment of what is good and what is not and must be taken into account, in the realm of action we weigh results, quite apart from intention. Wanting to do well does not carry the same weight as wanting to do good.

Another philosophical theme: Dorothy's three friends, as we realize almost from the start of their journey, possess unawares the boons they seek from Oz. By employing this conceit -- the "brainless" Scarecrow, for example, turns out to be the one who conceives the ingenious idea of chopping down a tree to make a bridge across the gulf they must cross in order to escape the ferocious Kalidahs -- Baum asks us to ponder the value of self-knowledge and self-awareness. He makes us reflect on the relevance of these capacities in education and in other spheres of life and, indeed, in any pilgrimage that can be conceived as an adventure along a yellow brick road. He treats here, in his way, the theme made famous by Eliot's luminous lines from The Four Quartets, penned over forty years later: "We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time."

Dorothy's direct interactions with the Wicked Witch also prove highly instructive. Seeing the mark made by the protective kiss on her forehead, the Witch backs off, for, as Baum writes, the Power of Good is greater than the Power of Evil. But, undaunted in her malevolence, the Witch persists with her scheming and cleverly concludes that, since Dorothy does not know how to use her power, or even understand that she has power, she can still be enslaved. Once again Baum opens our eyes to the tremendous value of self-knowledge. The narrative circles back again and again to the ancient Greek adage, thought to have been inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: "Know thyself." And reflecting on that, we perceive its intimate connection with the problem of identity and with, therefore, the ship of Theseus.

The question of merit, and the meaning of merit, also echoes throughout Oz. After the friends reach the Emerald City at last, the Wizard asks Dorothy why he should help her, and she answers touchingly: "Because you are strong and I am weak; because you are a Great Wizard and I am only a helpless little girl." These words ring with the logic of youth -- a small child, by virtue of her being, deserves nurturance, protection, and gratification. Babies are unconditionally loved. We ask nothing of them. Yet as they grow older, rules ensue, and merit rears its head. "In this country," the Wizard replies to Dorothy, "everyone must pay for everything he gets." Similarly, to the Scarecrow, he repeats, "I never grant favors without some return." These interviews occur, moreover, at the precise midpoint of the book. They highlight a significant milestone in the learning process.

It may be too much to hope that a new movie of Oz directed by Sam Raimi will try to convey any of this intellectual richness. Yet beyond spreading color, invention, and enchantment, L. Frank Baum's masterpiece remains a literary work that inspires children to think; its well-worn printed pages and its quaint pictures open onto serious and expansive vistas of mental excursion.

Ellen Handler Spitz is the Honors College Professor at the University of Maryland (UMBC). Her latest book is Illuminating Childhood.

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