A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government (review)
romantic myth of the artist as a baffled genius. He describes Geisel as one who could not make his own coffee or pay his bills because he lived so deeply inside his imagination. Pease does note that from the 1920s until the end of World War II, Geisel was not above trafficking in anti-Semitic, racist, and ethnic stereotypes in his satiric cartoons. Pease asserts that Geisel used "racist humor, for instance, in a depiction of the winner of the fight between Kid Sambo and Highball Thompson as either a shade lighter or a shade darker" (52). Further, "the nation's war against Japan resulted in cartoons that drew on racist stereotypes to which he was otherwise opposed" (67) and "the horrors to which Jewish populations had been subjected led Geisel to regret the anti-Semitism depicted in some of his earlier artwork" (65). To Geisel's credit, many of his postwar works, including Horton Hears A Who (begun in 1953), with its famous line "A person's a person no matter how small," were attempts to make amends for whatever harm his earlier works may have inflicted on minority groups. A distinguished addition to the "Lives and Legacies" series of Oxford University Press, Theodor SEUSS Geisel makes clear how and why Dr. Seuss has had such a major impact on how children have learned to read since the 1950s. As Pease points out, Geisel's work has been translated into fifteen languages, and more than 200 million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. In 2001, Publishers Weekly listed fourteen Dr. Seuss books among the top one hundred all-time best-selling hardcover children's books. As impressive as are these figures, Pease's sensitivity to the quality of linguistic play and the substance of the author's communitarian message demonstrates why Seuss's art has earned its continued admiration and universal respect.