Michael Medvedi Medvedi itibaren Kudiya, Madhya Pradesh 486775, India
Dr. Suess emerges as a completely fascinating person in this book. His life and acheivements were remarkable and the way he lived was intriguing. It seems that fate meant for there to be a Dr. Seuss to help kids to read and an incredibly odd set of happenstance and luck got him to where he was--to say nothing of his actual talent with words and pictures. The prose of the book at times didn't resonate with me but the events described were amazing. I really had a hard time picturing Dr. Suess interacting with certain literary figures of the time like Theodore Dreiser and Vladimir Nabokov. I have no doubt they happened, I just can't picture the guy who wrote Lolita talking to the guy who wrote Green Eggs and Ham. That isn't the authors' fault, it's mine. There is one point in the book where Dr. Suess kind of lets you down but he bounces back from that for the rest of the book. It was really intersting to see his early days, globe trotting, sketching everything in sight, dropping out of Oxford and proposing marriage in a ditch. Yep, in a ditch. That was the kind of person he was. By the end of the book you get the sense of just how far a reach his books have. There were Dr. Suess books in 1937 and it is now 2011 and considering how much my own kid wants Dr. Suess books read to him it's obvious that Dr. Suess will be widely read for at least another century. And as subversive and rebellious (in a good way) that some of his books are, is how he was. That was nice to see. I think his brain just worked completely different than anyone else's and thank goodness he could share that with the world.