Dr. Seuss-Theodor Geisel-deemed it his best book. Like the long-ago banning of E. B. White’s “ Stuart Little,” by the New York Public Library, the rumpus about “The Lorax” is at first bewildering. “I speak for the trees,” the Lorax says, attempting to defend a soon to be blighted forest, its tufted Truffula trees chopped down and knit into hideous thneeds-“a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need”-until there is nothing left but one single seed. The book is “ Silent Spring” for the under-ten set. In 1989, the year that Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie, for writing “ The Satanic Verses,” American parents in Laytonville, a small town in Northern California, demanded that their children’s elementary school take Dr. Seuss’s 1971 book, “ The Lorax,” off its list of required reading for second graders.
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