Dr. Seuss, the late children’s book author currently under fire, has gone crazy in book sales.
Nine of the top 10 books on the Amazon bestseller list right now are all by Dr. Seuss starting with “The Cat in the Hat.” Nine.
Seuss also holds about 15 spots right now between number 11 and number 50 on amazon. And none of those are the six that are going out of print after controversies concerning racist features in those volumes.
In fact, “If I Ran the Zoo,” a book I loved as a child, is number 98. “And to Think I Saw it on Mulberry Street” is number 168.
Seuss’s masterpiece, “The Sneetches,” is number 10. Read that one first. A brilliant piece of satire, that will tell Theodore Geisel was not a racist.
The overreaction to possible Seuss book burnings, to his being “canceled” by the current thought police, to Fox News losing its mind on this subject, is something no one could have anticipated.
The Lorax, the Grinch, Sam I Am, they’re all fine. The books with images now considered racist will be removed. Maybe they’ll modified and reintroduced. The culture is going through a watershed moment, sorting out episodes from the past that are now unacceptable. (They were unacceptable then, only no one owned up to it.)
We will adjust, the culture will adjust and we’ll move forward enlightened and chastened. In the meantime, someone is buying up every copy of every Dr. Seuss book as if they’ll be removed from publication. Except for the six withdrawn by Seuss’s family, the others will remain. And now go back to print. Cash registers are ringing.
