After reading Lakshmi Chaudhry's negative review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows masquerading as political commentary, I have two questions: Did this person actually read the book? And why is The Nation publishing this nonsense in the commentary section?

Ms. Chaudhry uses only those facts that agree with her thesis (and then only selectively). She decries Voldemort's being too simplistic to be at the level of Tolkien (he's not), then equates him to Sauron from the "Lord of the Rings." This makes no sense. She then decries Harry for acting like a 17-year-old and not being a more like a cardboard cut-out hero himself. The logical flaws and factual errors in her argument are legion and not worth more of anyone else's time.

As for politics, Rowling has stated her progressive tendencies on many occasions, though this, and her actual writing, isn't enough to convince Chaudhry--who actually compares Rowling's denoument to George Bush's ideal America. Rowling's books are full of political statements--the predjudice against those not of "pure-blood," the treatment of the house elves and the way the Ministry of Magic uses "secrecy" to hide its mistakes, to name a few of countless. And when she says Harry does not care for the suffering of those he doesn't know, Chaudhry proves that the Cliff's Notes she used to write this review were clearly inadequate. Harry disproves her point multiple times in Book Seven alone.

Chaudhry needs to go back to school and learn not to grind her own political axe when reviewing someone else's work. And The Nation should be ashamed of itself for printing this hackneyed garbage. You have a book review section. If you want to review Rowling's book, please do so. But don't call it political commentary and put it in the front of the magazine. And please, please, please, get a better reviewer than Ms. Chaudhry when you do.

Joseph Zeccola

Los Angeles, CA

Well, fine. It is possible to read Harry Potter and the DH as a portrayal of an apolitical and utterly provincial hero who cares little for great moral questions of right or wrong unless they seem to touch him or those he cares for personally. Such a reading is hard to square with certain elements of the narrative, like engineering a mass breakout of Umbridge's victims, or a crucial burial scene of a non-wizard, or the fact that Harry tells the Ministry to get lost at every opportunity. But this kind of debate is dueling over trees and not forest. Ultimately, the "political" message of book seven, like one through six, has little to do with the Ministry. These books embody two principles--treat others as ends and not means, and vanquishing evil requires collective action--progressives find quite familiar.

Rowling makes clear that it is Harry's moral choices that keep him from becoming like Voldemort, and conversely, that Voldemort could have ended up like Harry if he chose to. Harry chooses to respect the basic humanity of others (including the nonhuman characters), even to the point of saving the lives of his mortal enemies. You can trivialize this story as nothing but "Harry and his friends," but it is much more about building community than just hanging out in the Gryffindor common room.

The power to build friendships and families can be retrograde or revolutionary--it all depends on how widely you draw your circle. Harry learns, over the course of the books, to draw his circle ever wider, and to throw in his lot with others who do the same. He is fighting against those who would police the boundaries of acceptable community along lines of money, power and racial purity. Not bad for a work of popular children's fiction.

And ultimately, that choice pays huge dividends. It is surely no accident that the heroes of the series are a motley crew of freaks and geeks, many of them outsiders in one way or another. But Harry needs all of them to survive and succeed. While I confess some impatience with the overly complex storyline of book seven, and all the various oddly named objects that come into play, it does yield one important benefit. In the end, Harry can only vanquish Voldemort because of actions Ron, Hermione, Neville and others have already taken.

As for Rufus Scrimgeour, well, the world is a funny place, isn't it? Who would have thought John Ashcroft would have found his moment to defend the Constitution? In HP7, many of the heroes are flawed, and the most surprising dogs have their day.

The book itself, and the series, is far from perfect. Why is so much of Hermione's physical heroism off-screen while Ron, Harry and Neville get great scenes? Why are the characters representing a more a multicultural Britain under-developed to the point of tokenism? But these books do one thing extremely well. They show us that we nagivate a morally complicated world at our peril. Thankfully many of us have a little help from our friends.

Pamela Coukos

Oakland, CA

It was torture reading the last Harry Potter book. The plot devices were repeated over and over, keeping track of the central themes was impossible and in the long run, there was never any interesting character development. I love the universe Rowling created, but come on, gang, the emperor had no clothes in the last installment.

David Bloome

Los Angeles, CA

In response to the point in some of these letters that "after all, the Harry Potter books are written for children": I know there are many adults out there who, whether they have children or not, love the Harry Potter books because they are lovable--both great fun and serious. Does it matter that they are "not Tolkien"? They have many delights that Tolkien's books don't, being more lighthearted and whimsical, while wonderfully multifarious and grave too. In writing disparagingly about the series, Ms. Chaudry splattered herself with some of her own ink. (Perhaps unbeknownst to her the quill she used came from Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes?)

Virginia Swisher

Madison, WI

The review of Harry Potter is nonsense!

Where else in popular literature can you find a depiction of totalitarian evil with its personal and spiritual depredations so well portrayed? Who else has even attempted to convey so viscerally to our children the value of freedom and the cost of surrendering to evil?

Harry's journey is spiritual, not political, and it speaks to the sacrifices each one of us must make to find our path in the world. Harry is an heroic figure precisely because his personal choices have universal implications. This is not true for all of us, which is why we turn to myth, religion and popular literature.

There is now a generation of young readers inoculated with the idea that it is their personal responsibility to resist evil, and to sacrifice themselves if necessary. We need more of this, and less banal, academic carping.

David Baum

Seattle, WA

Chaudhry is way off mark on in her condemnation of the Harry Potter series. She finds, "Voldemort finally reveals himself to be a cardboard imitation of an old-fashioned kind of baddie." She sums up Voldemort's crime as not having "any friends, for to be good, one must love and be loved. If that were the sole criterion for goodness, even Nazis would make the grade."

Voldemort is not a monster because he is so different from us, however. He is a monster because we are (potentially) so like him. Why doesn't Voldemort have any friends? It is certainly not because people like Bellatrix Lestrange and the Malfoys don't worship him and seek his favor. Rather, it is because of reification; Voldemort views all human beings as mere objects to be used for his power/enjoyment. He has made himself "immortal" by committing murder. This in turn causes irreparable harm to his soul--in Marx's terms, his species-being (see also Jean Jaurès.) Voldemort then takes his alienated being and invests it in valuable material objects. Voldemort is, essentially, what capitalism threatens to make all of us.

Chaudhry also assumes that the return to life the boring world before Lord Voldemort is a conservative desire for "what George Bush would call 'our way of life.' " Imagine, however, a return to a world before George Bush--a world in which we took our right to habeas corpus for granted. That could qualify as revolutionary.

I therefore agree with Tom Carson's observation that Rowling is a "smarter left-winger" than Chaudhry.

Larry Ladutke

Weehawken, NJ

It's pretty easy to shoot holes in a floating balloon. Save your criticism for work of a heavier nature. It's obvious that Rowling is no Tolkien, nor does she pretend or need to be.

Peter Koslik
Teams and Leaders

Seattle, WA

Writing a contrarian article about a highly popular subject is a sure-fire way to generate discussion among the readership. But sometimes this approach backfires and comes off as disingenuous, which is what happened here. In her review, Ms. Chaudhry does that which all politicians do. Namely, she takes the facts that support her position and ignores all the rest. She ignores the fact that in the entire seventh book the Ministry (the Government) is taken over by Voldemort (the Terrorists) and they function as they same entity. She also neglects to mention specific facts, such as Harry rescuing his longtime enemy, Draco Malfoy, from certain death in the Room of Requirement. This certainly seems to suggest that he cares for life above all else, whether friend or foe.

But, lest I get ahead of myself as Ms. Chaudhry has done, let us remember that the Harry Potter series is pop literature intended for children. Measuring J.K. Rowling by the yardstick of J.R. Tolkien is apples and oranges. Layered metaphor and diabolical battles between good and evil are no doubt constricted by the fourth-grade reading level. So relax a bit, and stop making notes in all the margins.

Michael Neal

New York, NY

The charge of "moral fuzziness" your reviewer levels against the Harry Potter books recalls the term "moral clarity" that right-wingers constantly ascribe to themselves.

Harry gradually achieves maturity in the books by understanding the flaws in his various fathers and by assuming responsibilities for action when their foresight fails. Only when he at last understands that his idolized teacher, Dumbledore, was driven by his own acute sense of failure, does he gain the insight necessary to undo Voldemort.

That insight isn't enough to prevent many friends from dying in the battle for Hogwarts; but he's capable of undoing Voldemort when he sees him for what he is, a frightened man who wanted to control others because he could not look at his own flaws and fears. Tom Riddle never grew up emotionally; this is the root of his brutality.

These moral and psychological perceptions drive the drama, and they drive fundamentalists wild. There are no fathers endowed with wisdom or queens radiating gentle beauty; good and evil are not cosmic forces embodied in hero-saints and demon-villains but the result of human steps and missteps.

There is no indication, either, at the end that they all live happily ever after; the student who despises Harry the most lives to have his own children, and to pass on the desire for revenge. The final moral meaning of the books is clinched when Harry reveals to his younger son, who is named for both Dumbledore and Harry's longtime nemesis, Severus Snape, that the Sorting Hat does not make the choice of which house to join; and the implication is that Harry could have wound up as another Tom Riddle had he accepted the Sorting Hat's suggestion that he belonged in Slytherin. The reader grasps that even Slytherin students, which has produced the deadliest of evil wizards, are not innately or essentially evil.

A thousand pities that The Nation should run a review which might easily have been printed in The Weekly Standard.

Jay Hochstedt

Scottsdale, AZ

Perhaps the most important thing to be taken from Chaudhry's review of the latest (and, apparently, last) product in the Harry Potter book franchise is the singularly odd fact that anyone would bother to try to deeply analyze the book.

The Potter franchise is a cash cow, which makes money from sales of hardcover editions to "quiet" bookish white pre-adolescents. It is a fairly straightforward childrens' book series comprised of by-the-numbers tales of special, if somewhat nerdy, kids who have gain access to magical powers, within the context of a fantasy world. This is a formulaic genre, not intended, as Chaudhry seems to believe, to contain some sort of deep, intellectual reflection on the nature of today's world, and current political themes and events. The book series has made J.K. Rowling and her publishers extremely rich, and has provided an escape for a certain category of kid. It's a product. It followed formula. Through whatever special magic that made Coca-Cola popular, it became a hit. End of story.

Why must we expend ourselves on analyzing that which was never intended for analysis, and that which really warrants no analysis?

Save a few words for the issues that really matter.

C. Frensley

Seattle, WA

Reading her review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I wonder if Ms. Chaudhry actually has spent any amount of time with the series. I would also wonder whether she has read the series in conjunction with a child, which is the actual audience.

My son has thoroughly enjoyed the series, and was most satisfied with this final volume. I read the series so that we could discuss the events, characters and themes that he discovers, but I have always understood that this series is directed at younger readers. This is not a cop-out, seeking to diminish the criticisms by saying, Well, it is only a children's story. But it does help to recall this reality as the readership intended is those who have not managed to created a significant scab of cynicism around their likes and dislikes. For my son, I see this as an opportunity to talk about the big issues of the day. I have encouraged him to dig deeper, to ask questions and to wrestle with some of the larger issues developed in these books.

This final volume follows, in a certain sense, the kind of quest that only a 17-year-old could really undertake, the hard task of figuring out what it means to make the transition from child to adult. Because of his youth and inexperience, Harry is not the most contemplative of heroes, but this actually lends some credibility to his character. In a sense he is a typical 17-year-old, thrust into a situation that is clearly beyond him, and trying to make the best of it. This means that he will approach these events in a way that strikes a great many adults as shallow or naïve. Guess what? This is probably more accurate a representation than usually is trotted out for our perusal.

As for the ending, this is where I think Ms. Chaudhry really displays a kind of blind elistism and a decided misunderstanding of the series as a whole, as she finds this domestic tableau hopelessly simplistic and shallow. I find the ending to be note perfect, for it represents the core of what Ms. Rowling was attempting in trying to describe Harry's deepest yearning--the value of a loving family. This may seem prosaic and hardly profound, but I question such an assessment. Ms. Chaudhry wants the grand sentiment of cosmic signficance. What most of us want is the reality of the love of family and friends safe to find their future at their own pace. When boiled down, the solutions to the grand conflicts in history and in the present day offer that opportunity. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness: I think I have read that somewhere before. Perhaps that is simply far too banal for Ms. Chaudhry. If so, that is quite a pity. If so, she has misread more history than one can imagine.

Ken A. Grant

Edinburg, TX

I have to admit to be a bit taken aback by the venomous attack upon the final chapter in the Harry Potter saga.

If I look behind some of the cheap point-scoring--such as "The shallowness of Rowling's enterprise is revealed in the vapid little epilogue that seems inspired less by great fiction than B-list Hollywood scripts"--I find it hard to find out what your problem with the book really is. On one hand you have problems with Voldemort being a cardboard cut-out villain, but then you go on to have a go at Harry for not being a cardboard cut-out hero and for the series not having a cardboard cut-out and crystal-clear moral?

I suspect--based on your favoring of Dolores Umbridge as a Bush-like wannabe and on you pulling Bush into the last sentence of your review--that your real problem with the book is that J.K. Rowling does not use the final battle in her book to mirror the great battle you see happening in American politics. Perhaps you'd have liked to see Harry lead the charge to impeach Voldemort?

I for one am glad that Rowling did not do like C.S.Lewis and make her book the kind of cheap allegory The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe is.

One of my favorite baddies in the series is the venomous Rita Skeeter, the "journalist." Perhaps if you want a crystal-clear moral message from Rowling, you should reread the parts in the seven books where she appears?

Stig Edvartsen

Dublin, Ireland

Dear M. Chaudhry: I get the impression you’re a Johnny-come-lately who sees the positive reviews and thinks, “Hmm, no one is going to read what I write unless I somehow come up with something incoherent and negative…and the facts be damned!” Of course a 17-year-old is going to struggle with resentment, self-pity and anger. That’s part of the brilliance of the series! Oh, and by the way, Harry never blames (and certainly doesn’t hate) Hermione for breaking his wand. And what on earth gives you the impression that the sins of the ministry have been swept aside? Have you actually read these books? But I guess I should expect that from someone who couldn’t resist the temptation to somehow bring George Bush into the argument.

G. Roberts

Deerfield, NH

Gosh, what an asinine piece. Did it never occur to you that, to make your case, you would have to prove yourself more generous, common-sensical, small-c catholic, humane and funny than the books? Not less, on every count? By the way, if you ask me, Rowling's a smarter left-winger than you are, too.

Tom Carson

Arlington, VA