Word: frogs
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There once was a family of Hungarian frogs that went on a hopping holiday to the mountains of Transylvania. The mountain forests were aswarm with wolves and wildcats, so the mother frog warned her children to keep quiet. Her youngest son defiantly boasted, "I am proud to be a frog, and it is in the nature of a frog to croak." He hopped off one day to the bank of a pond and croaked so loudly and so long that a mountain goat spotted him and killed him. "I told him not to croak," the mother frog mourned...
...various possible meanings of that story are the essence of an odd but ingratiating "documentary" novel called The Frog Who Dared to Croak (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 182 pages; $11.95). The author, as odd and ingratiating as his book, is Richard Sennett, 39, better known as an omnivorously brilliant professor of sociology at New York University. Sennett's hero, Tiber Grau, finds the folktale version of the frog story "pessimistic" and "not entirely clear." Grau is at this point a propaganda official in the short-lived Hungarian revolutionary regime of 1919, so he has the authority to rewrite the nation...
...book, one of Garp's sons mistakes a warning about an undertow where he goes swimming and comes to believe that a giant frog, an "undertoad," menaces him. It becomes a symbol for all the hidden dangers of modern life. The film never locates its undertoad and thus never confronts the true subject of the book. It is all just body surfing on a placid pond. -By Richard Schickel
PATRICK says the fact that Kermit the Frog addressed this year's graduating class at Harvard is an obvious emblem of the times...
...indeed. The boy who was last to be chosen for any pickup baseball team, who was labeled "the retard" by the boys in his phys.-ed. class, who was sickened by having to dissect a frog in junior high and ran outside to vomit with the others-"and the others were all girls"- found he could win friends and influence people with his movies. He enrolled in a Boy Scout photography program, where his success made him at 13 one of the youngest Eagle Scouts ever. ("If I hadn't been a Scout," Spielberg cheerfully admits today...