Regular marked price: $15.95Discount Price: $10.85
Cost Savings: $5.10 (32%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780826417084
ISBN number: 0826417086
Label: Continuum
Manufacturer: Continuum
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 301
Printing Date: 2005-02
Publishing house: Continuum
Sale Popularity Level: 211540
Studio: Continuum
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Dr Seuss: American Icon celebrates one of the most influential authors and artists of the 20th century: Theodor Seuss Geisel, best known as 'Dr Seuss'. Dr Seuss's ascendance from children's author to American icon confirms that his cultural significance rests not just with the beginning reader, but with the scholar, the artist, and the poet. Seuss's Beginner Books (starting with The Cat in the Hat in 1957) have obscured the enormous range of his contributions to American literature. Similarly, his art actually covers a range of styles, including Surrealism, Art Nouveau, and Cubism. Bringing to light the adult perspective behind the children's writer, Philip Nel also examines Seuss's lesser-known works. The book also features the most comprehensive Seuss bibliography ever produced, documenting his prestigious output.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
Trams (or any public transport) are not usually the best place to read and absorb scholarly texts. But this one has accompanied me on my daily commute, and I have been absorbed in it. It is well written and comprehensive, and tells the tale of a modern author, with plenty of "Fancy that" and "Well, well" moments. Highly recommended for stationary reading, too.
Rated by buyers 
-
"Dr. Seuss: American Icon" by Philip Nel is a thoughtful deconstruction of the life and work of Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss). In this thoughtful book, Mr. Nel deepens our appreciation for Seuss as a distinctively American poet, artist and educator. The author demonstrates Seuss' wide ranging influence and argues for his rightful place among the most important cultural figures of the 20th century.
An English professor at Kansas State University, Mr. Nel uses his historic knowledge to discuss how Seuss' text belongs to a tradition of great nonsense writers. Mr. Nel states that Seuss' carefully-constructed absurdist tales encourage children to challenge the status quo by gently skewering the grown-up world; elsewhere, he uses charts to show how Seuss effectively used meter and rhyme to complement his intentionally ridiculous plots and create masterful stories that have stood up well to the test of time.
Mr. Nel recounts Seuss' early career as advertising illustrator and political cartoonist to help us better understand the influences that shaped his classic children's work. As an artist, Mr. Nel suggests that the term "energetic cartoon surrealism" appropriately describes Seuss' creative synthesis of cubism, art nouveau, surrealism and other styles. While Seuss' influence can be detected in modern rap music, children's books, political cartoons and more, Mr. Nel contends that Seuss would not have been happy about the manner in which his works have been posthumously marketed, opining that the "Disneyification" or simplification of Seuss' stories for marketable purposes "threatens to make 'Seuss' synomynous with the ambiguous power of global capitalism". Such commercialism would appear to collide with Seuss' desire to develop critical thinking among young people and to help us all imagine a better world.
I highly recommend this book for everyone interested in gaining greater insight and perspective into one of America's greatest creative talents.
Rated by buyers -
Philip Nel - Dr. Seuss: American Icon
This is basically an academic overview of Seuss poetry, art, cartoons, and the problems with the commercialization of the Seuss name and works after his death. It is not, to any real extent, a biography. Those seeking such should move on.
As an academic book it leans on the dry side. It assumes the reader has a fairly good knowledge of Children's Literature and 20th Century cartoons (not the animated kind). Not a book to begin your Dr. Seuss experience with. But if you have read them to your children and are interested about the writing style (there is a good chapter about his poetry) or his art style (not as good a chapter, but still interesting).
What interested me the most was the deconstruction of the recent rush to "cash in" on Seuss by Hollywood and advertisers. I think that Nel wants to come down against it, but based on Seuss' background (he started out drawing Flit ads) and the projects he approved during his lifetime; it is a tough argument to make. In the end though Nel does point out that maybe the movies and tie- ins did not have to be so... crass?
The book is well researched; lots of neat tidbits are to be gleamed. Early cartoons by Seuss for PM magazine were occasionally (by today's standards) shockingly racist. It makes him a little more human and puts his latter works like the Lorax in a new light.
Those in Education may enjoy this background. Fans of Seuss will enjoy the exhaustive bibliography of Seuss's many, many works. Also good list of other works about the man.
Rated by buyers -
Theodor Seuss Giesel was best known as 'Dr. Seuss', one of the most influential and enduringly popular children's authors of the 20th century. Giesel created not only his famous imaginative picturebooks, but a unique art and poetry, and even a place for himself in politics. Philip Nel argues that these added activities make Dr. Seuss one of the most influential people in America - certainly the most influential poet - and Dr. Seuss: American Icon provides the reader an memorably excellent survey of Dr. Seuss' many achievements.
Rated by buyers -
I don't care much for Dr. Seuss but after reading Philip Nel's book I changed my mind--that's a good testimonial to the power of Rel's writing and thinking. Rel plays Dr. Seuss the ultimate compliment of treating him as a serious poet as well as one of the 20th century's most interesting visual artists, and after reading his book I decided that a trip to the Mandeville Collections of the library at University of California in San Diego was in order, so I could visit some of the incredible Seuss/Geisel holdings they have there.
There's almost too much to take in, for, like William Butler Yeats, Seuss led a career that constantly shifted and metamoprhized itself to meet new historical and political cirsumstances, so he seems to have been both a leftist and a conservative at different junctures of his career, both in politics and in art. As Nel shows us, he was once a cartoonist for the fabled PM magazine and, like Andy Warhol, he served his time slaving in the ad business too. All was in the service of amusing and broadening the minds of US children. Nel doesn't hesitate to administer a sound spanking to the Seuss industry that, since his death, has seen fit to license all kinds of awful products including the recent CAT IN THE HAT film with Mike Myers. Oh, what a cat-astrophe!
The book is great and I can especially recommend the work of the picture editor who has given us a bounty of good illustrations.
Find other books like this one:
