Word: wizard
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...child, just about any child, anywhere, and say the magic words Harry Potter. If, for instance, you utter this charm to Anna Hinkley, 9, a third-grader in Santa Monica, Calif., here is what you will learn: "What happens in the first book, Harry discovers that he's a wizard, and he's going to a school called Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. At the station he meets a boy named Ron, who's also going to Hogwarts. And on the train, they meet a girl named Hermione..." Given enough time, Anna will tell you the entire plot...
...persuaded that an orphan named Harry Potter, who has lived for 10 years with the Dursleys, his cruel aunt and uncle and their hateful son Dudley, in a faceless English suburb--specifically 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging--learns shortly after his 11th birthday that he is really a wizard. What's more, he is famous throughout the wizard world; although his parents were murdered by the evil Lord Voldemort (so feared that he is referred to only as "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named"), the infant Harry survived the attack with a lightning-bolt-shaped scar on his forehead...
...skinny kid with glasses, green eyes and an unruly shock of black hair, but he also harbors uncertain potentialities. Did he thwart Voldemort's assault because of innate goodness or because he carries, even as an infant, a strain of evil more powerful than that of the Dark Wizard's? This question will remind some of the Star Wars films and the tangled destinies of Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. But once such comparisons begin, they can lead in many directions...
...churns down the school corridors to music that sounds like the theme for The Wizard of Oz's Wicked Witch of the West; students scatter rather than get caught in the laser beam of her cool rage. In history class she makes one think of Harry Potter's Professor Snape, so regal is her malevolence, so acute her gift for the demeaning remark that cuts through the skin of her best students and into their fragile egos. Her intellect has veered into artful cruelty. Her ambition has been curdled by this life sentence in a town she was dying...
...feel sometimes as though someone has taken the lid off my stone," she confesses. "I feel very exposed." Shunning a press tour for the new release, she is busy working on the fourth of what will be seven books--one for each year Harry attends Hogwarts, his wizard school...