Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Zindel, Paul (Vol. 26) - Maxine Fisher

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MAXINE FISHER

[Paul] Zindel is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize as well as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award; The New York Times has included four of his books in recent lists of outstanding children's books. It is especially distressing, in light of his enormous prestige, to discover that [The Undertaker's Gone Bananas] could not have been more outrageously sexist if that had been Zindel's explicit goal.

Bobby is a brash fifteen-year-old who has virtually no friends. He views himself as a kind of superboy and attributes his rejection by his peers as stemming from the fact that, "I happen to hold poetry, goodness, and beauty above all qualities." When faced with examples of injustice in the world, he responds automatically with physical violence. His only and recently found friend is Lauri. He describes his initial impression of her as "a timid delicate angora cat."… Two entire pages are devoted to listing all of the unlikely things...

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1. Introduction
2. Diane Farrell
3. Zena Sutherland
4. The Times Literary Supplement
5. Marilyn R. Singer
6. John Rowe Townsend
7. Diane Gersoni-Edelman
8. The Times Literary Supplement
9. Mary Silva Cosgrave
10. Zena Sutherland
11. BEVERLY A. HALEY and KENNETH L. DONELSON
12. Isabel Quigly
13. Zena Sutherland
14. Isabel Quigly
15. Stanley Hoffman
16. Joyce Milton
17. Maxine Fisher
18. Jack Forman
19. Cyrisse Jaffee
20. Sally Holmes Holtze
21. Peter Fanning
22. David Rees
23. Paxton Davis
24. Judith N. Mitchell
25. Margery Fisher
26. A. Thatcher
27. Copyright

1. Paul Zindel