SOURCE: “Harry Potter and the Spirit of the Age: Fear of Not Flying,” in New Republic, November 22, 1999, p. 40.

In the following review, Siegel applauds the works of J. K. Rowling because they, in all their imagination, have brought reality back into society's escapist literature and “fantasy culture.”

Once upon a time, a boy on a broomstick flew into a nation that was significantly free from tradition and prescribed custom. So great was its freedom in this regard that it turned every social incident and every cultural expression into a symbolic occasion that might supply a sorely needed orientation to national life. If two teenagers went on a rampage of killing in a high school, the slaughter had partly to embody the nation's surrender to television or computers. If a series of books came out about the adventures of a nearly adolescent boy swooping around on a broomstick, the...