The Real Wizard of Oz
The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum

I 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 y......more

Can't recall why I decided to read this, but am so glad I did! True to its title, this is indeed "the life" and "the times," with equal emphasis on both — although I frankly found "the times" the more interesting of the two. The book is actually arranged in sections based on where Baum was living at......more

Maybe the poorest-written biography I have ever read. I lost track of how many times the author used phrases like "who knows" or "he must have" or "we don't know" or "perhaps" in order to speculate what could have happened when she otherwise had no evidence to support an assertion she wanted to make......more

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......more

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 t......more