With Help from The Lorax and Greta Thunberg
By Stuart Mitchner
“In The Lorax I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might,” said Dr. Seuss of his favorite book. In a 1990 interview with Publishers Weekly, Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904-1991) admitted “I was a preacher in that book, but I got away with it by disguising the message.”
The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham were a joy to read aloud to my infant son, but The Lorax was more, much more. On the other side of the typically bold and bright Dr. Seuss cover was a dark world of night-blue endpapers dwarfing the bushy-yellow-mustached Lorax, who looked alone and afraid against a haunted night sky while the yellow eyes of the sinister, ever-invisible Once-ler peered through the slats of a boarded up purple window. My then-3-year-old son had no trouble identifying with the boy who finds himself on the Street of the Lifted Lorax at “the far end of town where the Grickle-grass grows and the wind smells slow-and-sour when it blows and no birds ever sing excepting old crows.” more
