Customer Reviews

Rhubarb

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
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En route to a dentist's appointment as a teen-ager, I discovered a paperback edition of this screwy novel, and it lead me eventually to read everything by H. Allen Smith I could get my hands upon. The premise: a belligerent, zag-tailed feral tomcat is adopted by an elderly millionaire, gets named "Rhubarb" for his fierce cantankerousness, and inherits an ailing New York baseball team that just natcherally rises to pennant contention under the unlikely circumstances attending upon their change in ownership.

With no attempt whatsoever to prettify the character of the most un-Disneyesque animal protagonist in the history of popular fiction, *Rhubarb* tickled the hell out of me back then -- so much so that the dentist thought there was a leak in his nitrous oxide system. It's worth reading no matter how long it takes to find a copy. Anyone who can't take delight from this representative slice of America in the '50s is so much in need of a prescription for mood-elevating pharmaceuticals that obliging a patient to read the first chapter of *Rhubarb* and watching his reaction could probably serve as a better assessment of depression than the Beck scale.

This book has been in my family's library for the past 54 years, but I had never read it until last night when I was looking for something to cheer me up after I'd finished reading a very sad book that had drained me emotionally. I knew the premise of the book, had maybe seen the movie way back when and thought, "oh well, I'll give it a try." For the next four hours I laughed and laughed and thought of similar hilarities I'd read by Thurber, Thorne Smith and Max Shulman. It was a joy. The characters are goofy. Who cares if they're believable? They're hilarious! I've ordered everything else by H. Allen Smith (even though most of it is out-of-print. I'll be patient while Amazon.com looks in used book stores for me)It's a bit bawdy and very, very funny. Try it!

Rhubarb is an amusing H. Allen Smith yarn. When Thaddeus J. Banner (Gene Lockhart), multimillionaire owner of the Brooklyn baseball team, passes away, he wills the team and his $30 million estate to his pugnacious pet cat Rhubarb. Banner's press agent Eric Yeagar (Ray Milland) finds this hilarious, until he discovers that he's been appointed Rhubarb's guardian and business manager. One of the crosses Yeagar has to bear is the fact that his sweetheart Polly Sickles (Jan Sterling), the daughter of Brooklyn team manager Len Sickles (William Frawley), is deathly allergic to cats. Still, Yeagar must keep Rhubarb with him at all times, especially when the cat turns out to be a good-luck charm for the perennially basement-dwelling Brooklyn ballplayers. Thanks to Rhubarb's inspiration, the team makes it to the Pennant Race, whereupon the plot really thickens. This culminating with a zany sanity hearing brought about by Banner's disgruntled relatives to prove that the cat is mentally unfit to control the old man's money.

Rhubarb, H. Allen Smith; Doubleday & Co. (1946)


If you can survive the hilarious "Dedication," you're on your way sailing through a very creatively silly & rewarding experience - despite the book's length (the author also went overboard with his even funnier "Smith's London Journal," published in 1952).

Incidentally, H. Allen Smith ought to be elected to the Ouija Hall of Fame for creating the then-fictitious Thaddeus Whitcomb Banner - an eccentric, bombastic owner of a New York major league baseball team.

Only 27 years later, along came the real thing - George Steinbrenner.

ok read. not 4 kids. adult humor & language. adult baseball & cat lovers might enjoy.

Rhubarb is in hardcover, a very very ancient, yellow-paged relic of H. Allen Smith's salad days. I was pleased with delivery time and the book.

Although Rhubarb became H. Allen Smith's only book-to-movie effort, his fiction lags behind his nonfiction. The plot is scattered between a millionare feline and a cast of hopeless charecters. If Rhubarb is the only book of H. Allen Smith's you read, please try some nonfiction before giving up all hope.