MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Not the whole story
Some of the much-loved Dr Seuss children's books have been withdrawn after their publishers deemed them to be racist. That may be so, says CHRIS ORLET, but the wider picture provides even more cause for concern
PERNICIOUS: Some of the titles withdrawn from bookshops and Dr Seuss cartoon of a Japanese man handing out TNT explosives to fellow Japanese US citizens
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
A FRIEND delights in sending me news stories that demonstrate what he says are the excesses of “liberalism.” One recent article that arrived in my inbox concerned Dr Seuss Enterprises’s decision to halt publication of six children’s books it now believes contain racist imagery.
“I didn’t realise Dr Seuss made us all racists,” he quipped. As usual, a flippant retort to a flippant remark moves the conversation nowhere. One has to dig a bit deeper.
The newly delisted books — And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, The Cat’s Quizzer — were all created between 1935 and 1976, a time when racist imagery in cartoons was as common as giant noses.
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