Dr. Seuss Goes to War (Minear)

Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel, Richard H. Minear (Author), Dr. Seuss (Illustrator), Art Spiegelman (Foreword)

I'm a math teacher but I work as a substitute. One day late last month, I had a coverage in a history class, and as I sat at the teacher's desk as glanced back at his bookcase, one title jumped out at me: Dr. Seuss Goes to War.

I had known that Theodor Geisel (aka, Dr. Seuss) had done war cartoons, but I don't think I've ever seen more than a sample or two. And suddenly here they all were! (Not all of them, actually, which I didn't know until I read the text.)

I couldn't let the opportunity pass, so I took the book back to the teachers' room during my prep period, and by the end of the day, I had read all of the comics. However, I had little time to read the commentary. The good news is that the book was available as an ebook from the public library. The bad news is that this book sucks as an ebook.

Part of the problem with reading just the comics is that there are references to historical people who I hadn't a clue about. I knew (from all things role-playing materials) the Charles Limbaugh became involved in politics after flying across the ocean, but some of the other names meant nothing to me. One was a world leader while others were editorial and opinion writers. Seuss had a problem with the New York Daily News along with some other publications as well.

One of the problems with the ebook is that the comics are grouped by topic, not chronologically. And the text is heavily annotated -- there are links to each of the comics, which is great, but jumping back to the text is a pain in the backside. This is one time where it would be better to have a finger holding one page while you flip to the other. Maybe there are easier ways to do this in Kindle, but that's beyond my current knowledge of its functionality.

Another surprise reading through the book: a Horton-like elephant appears in several comics, with tusks in two of them, even though he's supposed to be an Indian elephant. At first, I thought this was a prototype, but somewhere the text (or possibly, I "googled" it) I discovered that Horton Hatches the Egg was published in 1940, which was before Seuss went to work for P.M., and created these comics. I never read Yertle the Turtle, either as a kid, or to my kids or nieces or nephews, but the proto-Yertle appears in these pages.

A fascinating read, but if you can, go for the paperback.

Post-script: When I searched for the book image and author information, I found out that the paperback was published September 2001. An odd time to be going to war, don't you think?

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