The Wonderful Mysteries of Oz.

Prepare to kiss your childhood fantasies goodbye. It turns out the yellow brick road is really a brick walkway in Peeksill, New York, and Toto comes from the Latin phrase in toto. Frank L. Baum, an out-of-work chicken farmer, began looking for employment in 1900. All of a sudden, he had an epiphany, and before he knew it, Dorothy, The Tin Man, and the Emerald City were flowing out of his pen. In a new book, Finding Oz, Evan I. Schwartz draws mystical conclusions about The Wizard of Oz—he contends that Baum may have been very influenced by his mother-in-law, a well-known feminist in her day who may been influenced by Eastern thought. Writes The Wall Street Journal: "Though it's all a bit overwrought, it's hard not to warm to Mr. Schwartz and easy indeed to join his quirky search for whatever it was that went into Frank Baum that could make ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ come out of him."