Customer Reviews

Once Again to Zelda: The Stories Behind Literature's Most Intriguing Dedications

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I don't know what book the person below read. Yes the info on each novel is short - it's supposed to be! It's meant to provide quick blurbs on each author, not an entire master's thesis on each.

I got this book because I'm a huge lit fan, and I thought it was an intriguing way to look at some great classics.

We all know the classic story of Jane Eyre, but did you know that it's eerily similar to the life story of Bronte and the man she "Respectfully Inscribed" it to, writer William Thackeray? Or that it essentially ruined the careers of both authors after it set off a firestorm of rumors about the two? Or that Virginia Woolf dedicated her gender-bending novel Orlando to her greatest female friend Vita Sackville-West, with whom she had a fiery affair?

It's these kind of insights that show that the stories behind these dedications are just as intriguing and complex as the novels themselves. A great gift book for any literature lover!

"Once Again to Zelda" is a fun and well-researched book that satisfies the voyeur in any of us. Author Marlene Wagman-Geller was intrigued by the sometimes cryptic dedications in books, and she tracked down the stories behind the sentiment. some of them are funny, and some of them are romantic, and with some of them you just thank the good lord in heaven that you aren't living their lives.
It's a lot of fun to read.

Turn to any page in Once Again to Zelda: The Stories Behind Literature's Most Intriguing Dedications by Marlene Wagman-Geller and there will be a story of romance, passion, drama or inspiration. With an international roster of authors, and a list of titles running from the contemporary to the canonical, Once Again to Zelda (the title is taken from the dedication of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby) is a delight.

Inspiration for the book came by way of Grace Metalious' Peyton Place. When Wagman-Geller read the dedication, "To George, for all of the reasons he knows so well," she had to learn the story behind the story. One juicy detail led to another, and now Wagman-Geller is what she calls a "Dedication Detective."

In Once Again to Zelda, she reveals how Ayn Rand's husband shares his Atlas Shrugged dedication with his wife's lover, and explains the moving tale behind John le Carré's decision to dedicate The Constant Gardener to "Yvette Pierpaoli who lived and died giving a damn." Each tale is a wonder of literary insight and a whole lot of fun.

I love the idea - an exploration of fifty famous book dedications, and the relationships behind them. And Wagman-Geller does have the knack of telling a story. It's lovely to read, easy to get through pages, and is a beautifully designed book.

But honestly! Whenever she started on about an author I actually knew something about, I questioned her version of events. For example - she says that Queen Victoria demanded her piano legs be covered and told her daughters to lie back and think of England. I would argue both of these 'statements' are pretty tenuously grounded in fact, but I guess we could let them go. But then she claims that Middlemarch is a novel with a theme of common-law marriage (really?), that Dostoevsky was reprieved from the firing squad by an imperial messenger (I understood the plan was always to make the men go through a mock execution to break their spirits), and she persists on referring to the book by Thomas Wolfe as "Look Homeward Angel" with no comma after 'homeward'.

It's tiny things like this which made me look at the references, where I was shocked to find that almost all of the research for the book had been done on the internet, a really large proportion on WIKIPEDIA. Now I love Wikipedia as much as the next person - I've written a few entries for it, even - but it's NOT suitable primary research material for a book!

She is also, I have to add, totally fixated on great love affairs, and people who loved one another until they died. She invariably finishes a chapter by remarking on how much the couple still loved one another at the point of their deaths. I can't help feeling this says more about her than about the authors themselves. :-)

So on balance, a very enjoyable read, but do I trust Wagman-Geller's stories about writers? Er....nope! But a fun read, all the same.

The concept of this book was interesting, but the author poorly wrote the book and as another reviewer pointed out much of the research was done on the Internet. Sadly, Wagman-Gellar even with good research managed to get several things wrong. The chapter on Laura Hillenbrand's dedication, contained several errors in terms of chronological ordering. Any person who researches Hillenbrand and her husband Borden and then reads the chapter in Wagman-Gellar's book will see how Gellar misinterpreted several stories about the couple and got certain dates of a couple of events wrong. Wagman-Gellar in the book, made it seem as if Hillenbrand wrote the book and then sought out a publisher. That wasn't true at all. Hillenbrand used a magazine article she wrote, as a proposal for publishers. She eventually was contracted under Random House. I wouldn't be surprised if Wagman-Gellar wrote several of the other dedication without a complete accuracy.

I guess a more appropriate title would be " I Didn't Know This"..I enjoyed it all and learned a great deal..this book prompted me to read books written by the author to whom a book was dedicated..

I love the concept behind this book, but the implementation is a bit shaky. Others on this page have documented some of the research problems with this book, including a reliance on wikipedia(!). I found another example a bit troubling: On the chapter about Number the Stars, starting on page 204, the author claims that the Nazis ordered that Jews in Denmark had to wear a yellow star, and "according to legend" King Christian wore a yellow star and then ordinary Danes started doing the same, frustrating the purpose of the Nazis. The author hedges, saying that "this story may be merely urban legend."

That made me extremely curious. That's within living memory, so why is it unverifiable? The truth is, the hedging is completely unjustified; the event as described simply never happened: [...][University of Minnesota, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies]

"The King of Denmark Did Not Wear a Yellow Star

There is a great mythology about King Christian X of Denmark wearing a Yellow Star after the occupation of Denmark. The king did ride his horse every day in public, but the Yellow Star was never introduced by the German occupiers in Denmark. The myth of this probably comes from the novel by Leon Uris, EXODUS.

In the book QUEEN IN DENMARK (1989) Anne Wolden-Raethinge includes a quote by the Danish Queen Margrethe II about the mythical story: "It is a beautiful and symbolic story, but it is not true. The myth about the King wearing the star of David ... I can imagine that this could have originated from a typical remark by a Copenhagen errand boy on his bicycle: 'If they try to enforce the yellow star here, the King will be the first to wear it!' To me, the truth is an even greater honor for our country than the myth."

The Museum of the Danish Restiance in Copenhagen has a full display entitled "The King of Denmark did not wear a Yellow Star," and tells the full story. The Museum does note the following: "The Germans never attenpted to introduce the yellow Star of David in Denmark, and it is a myth that such an attempt was frustrated by the Danish King, Christian X. Those Danish Jews who were deported to Theresienstadt were, however, forced to wear the star.""

Uncovering this took little research, and I found no source indicating that it actually happened. This is akin to a George Washington biography relating the famous cherry tree story and then claiming it "may" be an urban legend; it's misleading to phrase it that way, because we know the story isn't true.

One of the great things about this book, if you are a busy person, is you can either read the book from cover to cover, or pick and choose the stories behind the dedications you want to read. You'll know all or almost all of the authors by name, but might not have read a couple of books. Even if you haven't read the books, the stories behind why an author dedicated a book to a certain person are so gripping, you'll want to read them all! You certainly get to know an author in a very different way by knowing why they dedicated their book to that person (sometimes an animal!). You get to learn about their love life for example...many times it was very racy and other times it was just a rumor.... Either way, it makes for a fascinating, can't-put-it-down read!

San Diego writer Marlene Wagman-Geller has assembled the fascinating stories of 50 well-known authors. Using the dedications in their books, which are sometimes a puzzle, and sometimes seemingly self-explanatory, she gives details that are funny, sad, and downright shocking. Reading this is like finally being one of the grown-ups at a family reunion and getting to hear the juicy bits from the aunt with the good memory.

What an interesting book! I have often wondered about the dedications of books I've read. I had no idea, until I stumbled across this book, that someone so cleverly put together a compilation of background stories on these intriguing dedications!
This is a great read when you only have snipets of time.