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Journalism loves an easy irony--and no irony is sweeter than the idea that some creator of a cherished work should have proved less lovable than his or her creations. What most adult lovers of the Winnie-the-Pooh books seem to know about author A.A. Milne is that through a combination of obliviousness and neglect, he saddled his only son Christopher with a perfectly awful childhood--a fact that rocked the world in 1974 when Christopher Milne's memoir The Enchanted Places first appeared. In it, the "real" Christopher Robin painted the portrait of a father who was cold...
...could go off and have unsupervised adventures with his stuffed animals, however fantastical, was Milne's. Both writers were emerging from a Victorian tradition that saw children's literature as a didactic form whose function--if it wasn't to romanticize childhood--was to instill a respect for adult values and behavior...
...publicity machine went into action. The arrival was recorded by camera crews and a clutch of reporters, notebooks in hand. An exhausted Jessica seemed to understand that she always had to appear perky. "I enjoyed it," she said, forcing a smile, sounding, as always, like she was imitating adult speech. "I had two hours sleep last night." She was due to take off at 8:20 the next morning...
...were covering the event, some at the networks were chary. This was not a child prodigy playing the violin at Carnegie Hall but a first-grader flying across the country. There was something queasy about the whole thing, a little girl going too far in pretending to be an adult. On Good Morning America, Forrest Sawyer asked Lloyd Dubroff, "[The flight] does raise the question...I mean, when we hear this, we're kind of shocked. Is it illegal or dangerous or anything like that...
...real fascination and disgust turned on the idea of putting a seven-year-old at the controls (even with a qualified adult pilot watching her). The Catholic Church states that a child of seven has reached "the age of reason." The parents of most seven-year-olds will not say that "reason" is the first word that springs to mind. If Jessica had completed the flight in triumph, only a few would have muttered, "I'm glad it worked, but they took a hell of a chance." After the crash, the nation asked, virtually in chorus, "Were they crazy, putting...