From Amazon.com
Buried one foot below the surface of a field called Thistley Green in the English town of Mildenhall, a most fantastic Roman treasure lay for centuries until a ploughman came along in the 1940s and accidentally dug it up. What followed was the worst kind of tragedy, because it involves human greed and abuse of a good man's innocence. Gordon Butcher, discoverer of this treasure, was entitled by British law to the full amount of its market value. Butcher was not aware of this law; however, another ploughman named Ford did know about it, and managed to bamboozle Butcher out of the fortune.
This remarkable story was written in 1946 by a young Roald Dahl, who went on to write such beloved classics as James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Dahl's inimitable style blazes through even in his early career. The true story, republished with stunning art by Ralph Steadman, is as riveting as if it had happened today, with heartbreaking notes of unbearable unfairness and sincere naiveté. Each page, thickly covered with rich, dark splashes of paint, sketchy faces, and bits of collage, has a wild and ominous tenor, reflected in the ferocious weather that fateful day when the hapless farmer found--and lost--the greatest treasure ever found in the British Isles. (Ages 9 and older) --Emilie Coulter
From School Library Journal
Grade 5 Up-This story was originally published as a magazine article in the late '40s and again as part of the collection The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (Knopf, 1977). A simple, honest plowman in wartime England uncovers a king's ransom in Roman silver in a field. By law, it must revert to the Crown, but a crafty colleague tricks the man out of the treasure, which would have brought him millions of pounds had he turned it in immediately. The colleague, in the meantime, keeps the silver and only gives it up when he is caught red-handed by a visiting scholar. It is a wonderful story, told in direct, high-impact sentences with the confiding, sure voice of a storyteller. Steadman's artwork, which is done primarily in dark colors, is fairly prosaic and cold at the beginning, though the colors warm and the compositions become more focused as the tale progresses. The tone and temper of the illustrations match with the narrative, even though some of the pictures are a page behind it. However, while the compositions have a nice balance to them, some of the work is so abstract or dark that it is difficult to imagine why it was put together with a story primarily marketed to children. There is no perfect marriage of art and text here. Buy Henry Sugar for Dahl fans who may never have heard of The Mildenhall Treasure and leave Steadman for the galleries and adult art books.
Patricia A. Dollisch, DeKalb County Public Library, Decatur, GA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
