Rating: 
Summary: Keep this woman out of my house!
Review: If you've been introduced to the Disneyfied 1960s movie version of Mary Poppins, prepare to meet the *real* Mary Poppins. And prepare to be shocked, because the real Mary Poppins of 1934 is no smiling Julie Andrews. Of course there must be some appeal, otherwise this book would never have gained its status as a modern classic. Mary Poppins enters the home of the Banks family as a replacement nanny to take care of the four children, and her entrance into the home causes an immediate stir. Her remarkable ability to slide up banisters, walk into pictures, make humans float to the ceiling, and communicate with animals are just a few of her array of startling talents. In her presence the Banks children are never short of magical adventures. It sounds exciting and innocuous enough. But don't be fooled. These magical adventures are not entirely harmless. Mary Poppins is actually a witch whose heart is far from pure. True, Travers doesn't ostensibly present Mary Poppins as a witch, but her magical abilities clearly originate in a form of paganism closely connected to Eastern religions and new age philosophy. Nowhere are Mary Poppins' credentials as a witch more evident than a night-time incident when the Banks children find themselves in a zoo, with all the roles reversed - the facility is run by animals, and the cages contain humans. The fun is hardly innocuous, because there is talk of animals eating humans, and in the Snake House Mary Poppins' true heritage is revealed - she is a first cousin (once removed) to the serpents, one of whom she regards as the "Lord of the Jungle". Her kinship to the snake with the "terrible little forked tongue" is deeply rooted in Eastern philosophy, evident in what the snake hisses: "The same substance composes us - the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star - we are all one, all moving to the same end ... Beast and bird and stone and star - we are all one, all one - " This new age philosophy is far from harmless fantastic fun, but is frighteningly sinister. And if that isn't enough, Mary Poppins is herself a most beastly character. Her vanity knows no limits, as she constantly examines her reflection in every polished doorway. She is must cruel and unkind towards the children, showing them little or no affection. One critical writer once observed that Mary Poppins is `perhaps the most stodgy, negligent, abusive, elusive, misleading (and misguided), vituperative, vain and priggish beast ever conceived in the mind of an author.' It's a cruel assessment of Mary Poppins, but not far from the mark. The Banks children spend most of their time cowering in fear of her, never sure if she is going to treat them with meanness or magic. And whenever they are treated to magic courtesy of her witchcraft, she immediately messes with their minds by denying that it ever happened. Even the old woman in the shoe was more kind than this. Yet that's not all to the twisted adventures of Mary Poppins. One entire chapter, Bad Tuesday, features one of the Banks children in a most disobedient mood, taking great pleasure and delight in his evil deeds. It gives him a most wonderful feeling. Sadly, this behaviour is encouraged rather than discouraged. In another incident, the children travel around the world and meet stereotyped people from all four corners of the earth. Not surprisingly, this chapter has been majorly `revised' in the 1981 edition, which has softened Travers' original political incorrectness by changing these people to different animals from around the world. Despite her despicable character, when Mary Poppins leaves the Banks family at the end of the novel, the children are surprisingly most distressed at her sudden departure. They reject their mother's soothing words of comfort, asserting `Mary Poppins is the only person I want in the world!' Please! What poor fools! The truth is that the Banks family is a rather disfunctional family, and father and mother Banks play such a limited role in the lives of their children, that these four children would mistakenly rather have this beastly witch than nothing. Surely they are wrong. Despite the lure of her magic, a normal home and functional family is more blessed without the real Mary Poppins. I for one don't want this haughty and disagreeable character in my home taking care of my children. Keep this woman and this book out of my house!
Rating: 
Summary: especially for renee watkins
Review: in the odyssey classics edition (paperback) that i have, the chapter on bad tuesday is revised. instead of mary poppins and her charges meeting the human inhabitants of the north, south, east and west, they meet animals representative of the four corners: a polar bear, a macaw, a panda and a whale. i don't know if that's better.
Rating: 
Summary: A Book for Adults as Well as for Children
Review: It may seem that the summary of my review ("A book for adults as well as for children") is applicable to all the great children's books, and that is largely true. But I was amazed, when re-reading "Mary Poppins" recently (at the age of 39), to discover what a different book it is for a grownup. The book is through the children's eyes, and to a child it is about their magical nanny. But to me on re-reading it, the book was about the children. Their nanny is a woman their parents would consider rather ordinary, in fact quite common, a cockney. Her extraordinary stature in the children's eyes is due both to their seeing what their parents miss and to their considerable lack of understanding of what is going on. The Star Child, for example, is really a desperately poor girl who cheerfully wears rags. And no adult has ever had any trouble understanding why Mary's uncle couldn't stop laughing. I like the Disney movie a lot, but it has little to do with this book.
Rating:
Summary: The Original Mary
Review: Katie Nana has left the Bank family in need of a new nanny. But before they know it, a woman blows in on the East Wind. Literally. She takes the position of caring for the four children, Jane, Michael, and the twins John and Barbara. But with her extremely prim and proper attitude comes magical adventures. A day in the park, having tea, running errands, and even Christmas shopping can turn into an adventure when Mary's around. And the kids love it. This most decidedly is not the Disney Mary Poppins. Disney toned her down significantly for his movie, making her heart easier to see. Still, it's there if you look closely in the book. I had forgotten just how hard it is to see at times behind Mary's outward appearance and actions. Still, the kids come to love her because they know where they really stand. As with all books in the series, this one is a series of adventures. Each chapter tells it's own story, each story it's own fun, magical adventure. Those looking for Disney's Mary will be greatly disappointed. But anyone looking for a fun series of adventures will find a woman who does care for those around her, even if it's not always super obvious.
Rating:
Summary: The Original Mary
Review: Katie Nana has left the Bank family in need of a new nanny. But before they know it, a woman blows in on the East Wind. Literally. She takes the position of caring for the four children, Jane, Michael, and the twins John and Barbara. But with her extremely prim and proper attitude comes magical adventures. A day in the park, having tea, running errands, and even Christmas shopping can turn into an adventure when Mary's around. And the kids love it. This most decidedly is not the Disney Mary Poppins. Disney toned her down significantly for his movie, making her heart easier to see. Still, it's there if you look closely in the book. I had forgotten just how hard it is to see at times behind Mary's outward appearance and actions. Still, the kids come to love her because they know where they really stand. As with all books in the series, this one is a series of adventures. Each chapter tells it's own story, each story it's own fun, magical adventure. Those looking for Disney's Mary will be greatly disappointed. But anyone looking for a fun series of adventures will find a woman who does care for those around her, even if it's not always super obvious.
Rating:
Summary: Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers
Review: Mary Poppins is a fabulously funny book about a nanny named Mary Poppins who comes down from the skies. She is hired at 17 Cherry Tree Lane to nanny Jane, Micheal, John and Barbara. With fresh imaginative ideas like goin 'round the world with a compass or jumping into a chalk pavement picture, 'Mary Poppins' is a woderful fantasy thrill that is simply magic
Rating:
Summary: An enchanting classic that has, and will, endure.
Review: Mary Poppins and Mary Poppins Comes Back were among my favorite childhood books. Indeed, I still have my childhood edition, which contained both volumes, minus its covers and completely worn out with reading and reading again. You can imagine my delight to find the books reissued. I made sure my husband knew to buy them for me for Christmas last year. However, someone did see fit to change the chapter Bad Tuesday, in which Michael finds a compass which Mary Poppins uses to take them around the world. I suppose it was meant to make the book politically correct, but what gave the person who did that the right? It is too bad that today's young readers will not get to read the book as written.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful classic; troubling stereotypes
Review: Mary Poppins is a book about a family in the stifling "well mannered" hypocritical and malicious London suburbs of the 1930's. Kids who can understand Winnie the Pooh can understand the premises and get the ideas or at least enjoy the surprise adventures. It's a British middle class classic from the time of The Secret Garden, but it's much subtler. It's on the way to the classics of Dahl. Travers seems to me related, in her view of childhood, to such writers as Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf. This family (Mr. and Mrs. Banks) is represented by varying degrees of imagination, and the parents even more than the servants are a dead loss. But the outside world includes some people who fire up the children, even just by their strangeness. The nanny, the queen of their lives, whom one cannot really understand, must be somehow made to fulfill the needs of the children. Because she is really there, close and intimate, and is quite sensible with them, her disapproval does not mean rejection. And in fact she likes them better than she likes their parents. For them she becomes a magician who produces wondrous adventures. Now and then Travers has her levitate--she's definitely a good witch. Travers' basic point, if you read her as an adult, is that children know how to invest with magic both the strange and the everyday, drunkenness and snobbery, tyranny, poverty, wealth, and the nonsense they are told about the big world. Her inspiring conviction, the one that really inspires her and us, is that somehow the childhood power of feeling excitement and trust, which are expressed by the imagination, redeems us. I bet most Americans over fifty, if they read it before 1970, remember it lovingly. Most of us who enjoyed the book want to pass on the classic children's book. We want to read it to our grandchildren. But I will skip the chapter called "Bad Tuesday." The children visit the four directions of the compass and, like true children of the center of the world, fly in the four directions of the compass. There they meet friendly but absolutely stereotyped Eskimos in the North and Asians in the East and, in the south, a black family who are just as friendly and just as much from an old British picture book In a grass hut in Africa, they speak something that uses "Ah" for "I." Aunt Jemima as the English saw her. This story, interestingly segues into, and actually seems to cause the events of "Bad Tuesday," when evil swells and erupts like a heavy hot thing in the very body of [five year] old Michael. He is rude and wicked, and he can't feel sorry. He enjoys upsetting people. We might say he manifests all day a furious disregard for the feelings of others. It is like anger, but it is not only anger. Can he be reacting to the destiny of belonging to the master race? That night he has a nightmare of the four peoples, those friendly simple Eskimos and Indians and warriors from Asia and Africa attack him. Mary Poppins picks him up and holds him, and dryly accepts his gratitude to her, while he experiences at last freedom from the "burning heavy thing" that he's been possessed by all day. The swaggering covered guilt, the guilt covered fear. Travers knows something. But can that save the book when the reader is a sensitive and sensitized child of color. Or for that matter, a sensitive and sensitized child of the "white majority" or "the mainstream." We are in a period when our children think in terms of insult vs. respect and they don't want to hear, or they do want to hear, insulting stereotypes--while closing their minds to the rest. They use their reading to shape their part in playground and hallway politics, without concern for the author's intended effect. For the same reason that older kids will not find it okay to read Huckleberry Finn, kids of color won't feel good about Mary Poppins if it is read to them or if they read it themselves between seven and twelve. Or at least a certain moment will bring up a sense of shame or anger. In the meaner white or Latino kids, including wealthy ones, there will be malicious pleasure in reading about the "inferior barbarians." For the more caring kids, there will be a twinge of disgust at the falsehood. And for the virtuously indignant, this is a natural opportunity. Under these circumstances Travers irony and awareness, like those of Twain, are going to fly over their heads. So, I say, skip those first pages of "Bad Tuesday" until the child is old enough so you can explain them.
Rating:
Summary: Mary Poppins Best Book Ever
Review: Mary Poppins is a spectacular book about imagination and magic. It fulfills your heart with joy once you open the first page. And it is especially a wonderful book for children because children at a young age have a special gift in their minds imagination. When you read this book you will understand every single thing Mary Poppins does and how she does it for example when Mary Poppins first appeared popping out from a rocket on Guy Fawke's Day. I highly recommend this book to adults and children all over the world because you can build up your vocabulary so you can read and write and be creative with your own mind. I personally like the book because it gets more and more interesting as you read and it makes the reader want to go on to the next chapter and so on. It will also make you read faster. My absolute favorite part was when it was Mary Poppin's birthday and Jane and Michael (the two children Mary Poppins took care of) were sitting in a circus with seals and tigers all over. I also, enjoyed the part where Mary Poppins had a compass and while the children were falling to sleep in their dreams (that was actually real life) they saw themselves with Mary Poppins in the North Pole talking to a polar bear.
Rating:
Summary: Mary Poppins
Review: October 2, 2003 P.L. Travers
W.W. Norton & Co. Have you ever seen a stranger fly up a staircase, talk to animals, or put a star in the sky? Well, Marry Poppins can! This is one of the best fantasy books I've ever read and it's way better than the movie. Marry Poppins is about a family who live in a house made to look like a ship. When the family needs a nannie to take care of the children, Marry comes to fill the position. I really liked it when Jane, the oldest child, had a dream about going to the zoo with her bother Michael at night and how every thing there was upside down. People where inside the cages and the animals were watching and running around. It seemed to be Marry Poppins birthday and some lord snake was giving her a present, his shedded skin. The weird part about it is that Michael had the same dream and Marry the next morning was wearing a new snake skin belt. To find out more read the book. I did and I really liked it! Marry is a strange and mysterious woman who comes and goes when the wind changes. The characters had lots of attitude. Michael and Jane were the kids and John and Barbara were the twin babies. There was
the street painter who can jump into his own paintings. Also, there are the Mom and Dad who don't have a clue that Marry is a magical woman.
This was an awesome and creative book. It had lots of adventure and excitement. Like when Marry takes her compass, says a direction, and instantly she's there! I really liked it because I like fantasy books. Marry Poppins was definitely a page turner with great suspense because Marry Poppins can only stay a little while, but why?
|
