3.5 

How to Read Donald Duck

By Ariel Dorfman & Armand Mattelart
How to Read Donald Duck by Ariel Dorfman & Armand Mattelart digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

“ A literary grandmaster.” —Time

First published in 1971 in Chile, where the entire third edition was dumped into the ocean by the Chilean Navy and bonfires were held to destroy earlier editions, How to Read Donald Duck reveals the imperialist, capitalist ideology at work in our most beloved cartoons.

Focusing on the hapless mice and ducks of Disney—curiously parentless, marginalized, always short of cash—Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart dissect the narratives of dependency and social aspiration that define the Disney corpus. Disney recognized the challenge and, when the book was translated and imported into the United States in 1975, managed to have all 4,000 copies impounded. Ultimately, 1,500 copies of the book were allowed into the country, the rest of the shipment was blocked, and until now no American publisher has re-released the book, which has sold over 1 million copies worldwide. (The original English language edition is now a collector’s item, selling for up to $500 on Amazon.)

A devastating indictment of a media giant, a document of twentieth-century political upheaval, and a reminder of the dark potential of pop culture, How to Read Donald Duck was published in seventeen languages—and is now available once again, together with a new introduction by Ariel Dorfman.

Download the free Fable app

app book lists

Stay organized

Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.
app book recommendations

Build a better TBR

Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building tool
app book reviews

Rate and review

Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tags
app comments

Curate your feed

Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities
app book lists

Stay organized

Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.
app book recommendations

Build a better TBR

Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building tool
app book reviews

Rate and review

Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tags
app comments

Curate your feed

Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities

How to Read Donald Duck Reviews

3.5
“despite everything it was still enjoyable to read”
“How to Read Donald Duck by Dorfman and Mattelart is a non-fiction book. I have trouble with these. I reckon if my brain were more accustomed to the genre, if I could be as mentally invested in reality as I am in escaping it, I would have probably enjoyed this book more. It took me a while to read it; I found the chapters too long at times; but… But, I found the critique of Disney, and his vision of the world as manifest in the Duckberg comics, to be biting, insightful, and entertaining in a muck-raking kind of way. When I wasn’t feeling entertained, when the dopamine drip slowed to a trickle, it seemed like the text was verbose and repetitive, but in hindsight I’m not sure this was so, as it may be part and parcel of this genre to drive a point home from every conceivable angle of attack, thus making it a thorough critique. Not until the last third of the book when I decided to read aloud, giving full-throated inflection to the words on the page, did I feel how devastating and relevant this Disney takedown is. An alternative and likely explanation: the conclusion section is the most solid bit of prose in the book. I recommend How to Read Donald Duck if you watched Ducktales as a kid and you’re thinking now, “What’s wrong with Ducktales?” Well, I’ll tell you in short but read this book for the long and scholarly: Ducktales is patronizing, demoralizing, bad-incentive-forming, Capitalist propaganda. ‘That’s ridiculous!’ you say? All the more reason why you might be intrigued and informed by this book, and afterwards sit and muse, ‘What other twisted ideas have been surreptitiously crammed down my brain hole since childhood?`”

About Ariel Dorfman

Born in Argentina in 1942, ARIEL DORFMAN spent ten years as a child in New York, until his family was forced out of the United States by the persecution of McCarthy. The Dorfmans ended up in Chile, where Ariel lived through the Allende revolution and the subsequent resistance inside Chile. Accompanied by his wife Angélica, to whom he has been married for over fifty years, he wandered the globe as an exile, finally settling down in the United States, where he is now Walter Hines Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University, though he keeps a house in Chile. Dorfman’s acclaimed work covers almost every genre available (plays, novels, short stories, fiction, essays, journalism, opinion pieces, memoirs, screenplays). In all them, he has won major awards, leading to accolades from Time (“a literary grandmaster”), Newsweek (“one of the greatest novelists coming out of Latin America”), the Washington Post (“a world novelist of the first order”) and the New York Times (“he has written movingly and often brilliantly of the cultural dislocations and political fractures of his dual heritage”).

Armand Mattelart

ARMAND MATTELART (born January 8, 1936) is a Belgian sociologist and is well-known as a Leftist French scholar. His work deals with media, culture and communication, especially in their historical and international dimensions.

Start a Book Club

Start a public or private book club with this book on the Fable app today!

FAQ

Do I have to buy the ebook to participate in a book club?

Why can’t I buy the ebook on the app?

How is Fable’s reader different from Kindle?

Do you sell physical books too?

Are book clubs free to join on Fable?

How do I start a book club with this book on Fable?

Notification Icon