Word: potter
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Tyler Walton, 9, who submitted an essay for Scholastic's "How the Harry Potter Books Changed My Life" contest, has undergone arduous treatment for leukemia. "Harry Potter helped me get through some really hard and scary times," he wrote. "I sometimes think of Harry Potter and me as being kind of alike. He was forced into situations he couldn't control and had to face an enemy that he didn't know if he could beat...
...Last July the New York Times Book Review revised its best-seller list by splitting off a separate category for children's books. The move came just in time to prevent Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire from zooming to the top of the fiction list--and joining the three earlier Harry Potter titles firmly ensconced among the 15 slots. By shunting the wizard books out of its main chart, the Book Review fiddled with logic but appeased publishers and authors who believed they had been "Pottered"--denied best-selling status by the J.K. Rowling juggernaut...
...child who has not experienced personal trauma but has witnessed social strife is Magda Anastasijevic, 8, who lives in Serbia. Thanks to the international sanctions put in place after Serbia's war in Kosovo, the Harry Potter books have only just begun to appear in translation. But Magda's father knows English and has read all four Harry Potters aloud to her, simultaneously translating the original into Serbian. "I like Harry Potter because he never gives up," she says, "even though sometimes his best friends are against him." She knows that Lord Voldemort, the archvillain in the Potter books...
...about a child facing nothing scarier than the process of growing up, which can, some adults may dimly remember, seem very scary indeed? Greta Hagen-Richardson, 12, lives in Chicago and proudly says she has read each Harry Potter book many times--15, 11, 22 and 24, in order of publication, by her count. "When I first read them," she says, "I thought, 'The characters really relate to you--they're kids. They have bullies and bad teachers.' It's helped me understand something--people, maybe my friends, my teachers. It's influenced me to read more...
Multiply such testimonials--each heartfelt, each slightly different according to the circumstances of the speaker--by millions, and Rowling's effect on the world around us becomes, just barely, imaginable. And it's not only young people who love the Harry Potter books; they have been eagerly adopted by uncounted adults and have prompted serious academic attention. Vance Smith, an assistant professor of English at Princeton University who is spending this year as a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein's old bailiwick, has just delivered a lecture called "Harry Potter and This Ever-Changing Medieval World...