My mom liked to tell us that during the Depression, she would only get one gift for Christmas and it was always a Frank L. Baum book. Although we didn’t quite believe that anyone could be so deprived (my dad used to say he had to pick rocks out of the fields and walk ten miles to baseball), the treasure was there for us to examine anytime we wanted. She had all the books, but the only one we really liked was the original. I still have it, but no one’s read it in years because it’s a mess. The boards are / have fallen off, the pages are weeping. The only reason I’ve kept it is because I learned to read from it.

Well, I’ve found a worthy replacement. Wait until you see this! It’s from Counterpoint and it’s called Frank L. Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, Illustrated by Graham Rawle (978-1-58243-455-1). I’ve never heard of the guy before, but he seems to have accumulated plenty of accolades for previous collage work, and by collage I mean blending illustration and text. This is no exception. The typography in this unabridged version of the classic is wonderful, but what’s going to catch your eye are the illustrations. Using real items (dolls, masks, fruits), he’s placed them in miniature landscapes to create the most amazing Over the Rainbow ever. But it’s still Dorothy and Tinman and Toto, so fear not: even if you grew up with the Judy Garland version, you’ll find something to love. Check out the amazing Emerald City, or the field of poppies. If the Depression is getting you down and you can only give one book, make it this one.


Read other reviews of Best Picture Books at our 24/7 Bookshelf.

The Love Song of Monkey
Michael S. A. Graziano
Leapfrog Press
Softcover
978-0-9815148-0-2

If this book had a different title, it would be perfect. Just after he was stuffed into a suitcase by his wife and her lover (who was also his mad doctor) but before he was thrown off a motorboat into the Atlantic, chained to a statue of Venus taken from his own living room, that title was nagging at me. Monkey Man?

Here’s a guy, dying of AIDs and he’s offered the possibility of a complete cure, a better-than-new-cure, but only if he can endure indescribable pain for an hour. Okay, he does describe it:

"Some piece of equipment turned on with a harsh buzzing sound. Then the laser beam hit the bottom of my feet…. If I hadn’t been held down on the table I would have convulsed like a fish and crashed onto the floor. No person could have withstood that pain for any hope or goal. It vaporized my strength of will. I didn’t know anything except my feet. The pain lay in a precise plane, like a deli slicer, the rotating blade taking microscopically thin slices one by one, starting from the bottom of my feet and working its way upward. It seemed that every virus particle was a twist of metal, a splinter that needed to be wriggled and wrenched out, torturing the flesh around it. Every bacterium had to be exploded and the shrapnel scraped out with a blunt spatula. Every blemish, every bit of scar tissue, cut with a microscopic scalpel and excised. This was not the torture of a thousand knives. It was six hundred billion knives and drills and lit matches concentrated into one layer of flesh."

Graziano is a psychology professor at Princeton and author of several other books, as well as articles published in the New York Times, Science Magazine, and Glamour blending fiction, music, and science. The Love Song of Monkey is fabulously imagined and seriously considered and very funny. A kind of fairytale antithesis on the meaning of existence.

Now, if it weren’t for that title. It’s a little thorn. It announces itself boldly in the title, nags where it’s remembered during almost the whole book, then sneaks in at the end and squats there, black-caped, hook-handed.

Look, it’s only 152 pages long. It’s fantastic. It has a wonderful ending. Read it and tell me what you think.