Syllabi June 23, 2009

In Preston Sturges’s film Sullivan’s Travels (1941), convicts get a break from the woes of the Depression and chain-gang life at a screening of the Walt Disney cartoon “Playful Pluto.” Now, just in time for the current economic crisis, comes Disney’s first traditional animated feature in five years, The Princess and the Frog, due in theaters at the end of this year. With a New Orleans setting—and jazz-loving alligators, Cajun fireflies, and voodoo priestesses—the film promises to heal whatever post-Katrina wounds The Curious Case of Benjamin Button neglected. The following five books, meanwhile, are for the more cynical and knowing