Word: dragons
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...Galactic Empire lives again in Dune Messiah. But changed, changed utterly: Sci-fi's excursion into psychological explication (and Herbert wrote a psy-fi book, The Dragon in the Sea, a seriously flawed story of catatonic shock on the ocean floor) taught Herbert that nothing can be understood or explained. The new Empire shimmers with terrible beauty-haunting, unforgettable...
Beneath the book's attractively arcane surface, Borges makes some fine distinctions. The dragon, for instance, he classifies as a "necessary monster" because in some recurring way "it appeals to the human imagination." The book, moreover, provides an unprcs-sured look at the tastes and concerns that Borges began to develop as a child browsing in his father's well-stocked library in Buenos Aires, and an insight into the grotesque, haunting and often touching forms man has made of his fears and infatuations...
...DRAGON OF AN ORDINARY FAMILY, by Margaret Mahy, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury (Watts; $4.95). "Dragon, Housetrained, Unusual Pet, Very Cheap, 50?," or so the sign said when Mr. Belsaki, the father of the ordinary family, went out to purchase an ordinary pet for son Gaylord. With considerable help from attractively grotesque illustrations, both the dragon and Belsaki's life soon expand on an extraordinary scale...
...LAST LITTLE DRAGON, by Roger Price, illustrated by Mamoru Funai (Harper & Row; $3.50). A modern Just So Story about a little dragon with "a long spiked tail and 212 teeth" who, alas, couldn't breathe fire so the old sea turtle fixed that with some hot peppers, coal and oil, but then Algon burnt up everything around the house, so once again the old sea turtle, etc., etc., and that, oh best beloved, is how the first alligator was born...
IVAN AND THE WITCH, by Mischa Damjan, illustrated by Toma Bogdanovic (McGraw-Hill; $4.50); IVANKO AND THE DRAGON, by Marie Halun Bloch, illustrated by Yaroslava (Atheneum; $4.95). Two books, both worth reading, based on the same-folk tale-though the first claims to be Russian, the second Ukrainian. The Bogdanovic casein and pastel illustrations are blurrily magical. Yaroslava's precise pictures are closer to folk...