Promotional jacket text for Ariel Dorfman's The Emperor's Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds. Dorfman is also the author of How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic.

Nothing could seem more innocent than Babar the Elephant, the Lone Ranger, Donald Duck, or the Reader's Digest. Yet, in this daring book, Ariel Dorfman explores the hidden political and social messages behind the smiling faces that inhabit those familiar books, comics, and magazines. In so doing, he provides a stunning map to the secret world inside the most successful cultural symbols of our time.

Dorfman first examines the meteoric rise of Babar the elephant from orphan to king of the jungle and the way stories like his teach the young a rosy version of underdevelopment and colonialism. He then turns to purely American comic-book figures and shows how Donald Duck, the Lone Ranger, Superman, and other heroes offer a set of simple, disarming answers to the deepest dilemmas of our time without ever calling an established value into question. Along the way, with wit and wily style, he raises a series of always provocative questions: Why does the Lone Ranger really have that mask? Why do Disney comics teem with uncles and nephews but no mothers and fathers? How could a comic book help overthrow a government? How does an "adult's" magazine like the Reader's Digest continually transform us into children?

Here is a book that will appeal to those who want to understand the connection between politics and culture, between Ronald Reagan and Mickey Mouse, between economic theories of development and children's literature. It is for those who are fascinated by the mass media, for parents and teachers who are worried about what their children are watching and reading, for anyone who wants to understand the way ideas are produced and manipulated in the twentieth century.

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