The Fir Tree, Book of Dreams

["Karen L. Newcombe" <kln@crl.com>]

Hi OooohLaLune, glad to see you here, by the way.  

That story is "The Fir Tree" by our old friend, Hans Christian Andersen, 
also transcriber of "The Red Shoes" version which I typed out and posted 
here last year.

I don't have a complete Wilde in the house, so I'm not sure whether or 
not he has any Christmas stories.  But it is also possible that the Bush 
family had a similar  tradition of reading stories aloud during the 
holidays.  We already know that Kate loves one of Wilde's stories (See 
the uncut Interview Of Infamy for the few moments when Kate brightens up 
-- it is when she is discussing Wilde.)  Perhaps it was a Christmas eve 
when she first discovered the master storyteller.  Of course, this is 
pure uninformed speculation.

Info on Peter Reich's Book of Dreams, it was reissued a few years ago in 
a paperback edition with the Cloudbusting photo on the cover.  The 
publisher is Dutton and the ISBN: 0-525-48415-9.  I've seen it in both 
new and used bookstores in the past year and it should be easy enough to 
find or order.

I'm surprised the "X Files" crowd hasn't picked up on this one . . . a
large part of the book is Reich's childhood memories of fighting UFO's
with his father.  It is a strange and wonderful book, very intense, often
disturbing -- I don't like to think that in our own country someone would
be thrown in jail for doing something relatively harmless. 

I also don't like the idea that my government supported by my money would
burn books and manuscripts on our behalf . . . something I personally
associate with Facism, dictatorship, religious mania, and other
perversions of human rights. 
But they did, and 
prevented 
publication of 
his work for 
dozens of years 
later.
                                                           
It is an interesting book just for that aspect.  It is also fairly well
written. 


Karen  kln@crl.com