Word: pottered
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...child who has not experienced personal trauma but has witnessed social strife is Magda Anastasijevic, 8, who lives in Serbia. Thanks to the international sanctions put in place after Serbia's war in Kosovo, the Harry Potter books have only just begun to appear in translation. But Magda's father knows English and has read all four Harry Potters aloud to her, simultaneously translating the original into Serbian. "I like Harry Potter because he never gives up," she says, "even though sometimes his best friends are against him." She knows that Lord Voldemort, the archvillain in the Potter books...
...about a child facing nothing scarier than the process of growing up, which can, some adults may dimly remember, seem very scary indeed? Greta Hagen-Richardson, 12, lives in Chicago and proudly says she has read each Harry Potter book many times--15, 11, 22 and 24, in order of publication, by her count. "When I first read them," she says, "I thought, 'The characters really relate to you--they're kids. They have bullies and bad teachers.' It's helped me understand something--people, maybe my friends, my teachers. It's influenced me to read more...
Multiply such testimonials--each heartfelt, each slightly different according to the circumstances of the speaker--by millions, and Rowling's effect on the world around us becomes, just barely, imaginable. And it's not only young people who love the Harry Potter books; they have been eagerly adopted by uncounted adults and have prompted serious academic attention. Vance Smith, an assistant professor of English at Princeton University who is spending this year as a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein's old bailiwick, has just delivered a lecture called "Harry Potter and This Ever-Changing Medieval World...
...explain the literally unprecedented Harry Potter phenomenon, starting with Rowling, now 35, whose life has been changed utterly by the product of her imagination. Seven years ago, she was the single mother of a small daughter, living in a two-room flat in Edinburgh, listening to mice skittering behind the walls. Now she is internationally famous and earning, according to various estimates, somewhere in the range of $30 million to $40 million a year. Once, during a bad patch, she dreaded the hostile looks she would attract while lining up at the local post office to claim her weekly income...
...extensive publicity during the summer and fall for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, not to increase sales--a laughable notion given the enormous, pent-up demand--but to make herself available to some of her young readers. In October she went public for a project unrelated to Harry Potter but of personal concern to her. She agreed to become the first ambassador, i.e., spokeswoman, for the National Council for One Parent Families, a British charity, and donated $725,000 to the cause...