Saving Mr. Bingle Reviews
From Readers
I just finished reading Saving Mr. Bingle and wanted you to know how much I enjoyed it. It brought back many childhood memories of watching Mr. Bingle in front of Maison Blanche on Canal St. Thank you for making me smile and for giving Oscar Isentrout the recognition that he deserves.
- Jeannette Prater
Octavia Books
I read Saving Mr. Bingle last week and thoroughly enjoyed it. Methinks A Confederacy of Dunces must be as Holy a Bible to you as it is to me, and Haywood in particular is such a great character.
- Poppy Z. Brite
author of the novels Soul Kitchen, Prime and Liquor
It’s nice to see someone who wants to preserve the rich heritage that we have here in New Orleans. As the years pass, I see many artifacts, buildings and companies reduced to a faint memory. Thanks for holding onto the memories.
- DonnaDFG
I can’t tell you how much I love your book. Thank you.
- Joann Dionisi
My son, Tommy, got me your book, Saving Mr. Bingle, for Christmas. It is a story that I really enjoyed, but you really know how to make a girl cry. Please continue to write stories like this about our favorite things. You did a good job.
- Peggy Rutherford
Articles:
Some would say it’s a small miracle that the spirit of Christmas in New Orleans still lives on in the body of this snowman character wearing an ice cream cone hat and wings of holly leaves — a New Orleans icon that has brought smiles to kids’ faces for decades and now will continue to do so.
There’s even more reason to celebrate his return this holiday season. Some two decades after his death, the original puppeteer and voice of Mr. Bingle, Edwin H. “Oscar” Isentrout, finally has a tombstone at his previously unmarked grave in Hebrew’s Rest Cemetery No. 3 on Pelopidas Street in Gentilly.
“I had written off the possibility of this coming to fruition under the circumstances,” said Sean Doles, the driving force behind restoring some dignity to Isentrout’s life and career. Doles is the author of “Saving Mr. Bingle,” the book that brought Isentrout’s story to the forefront in 2004.
The cold world of commerce had done in Mr. Bingle.
The beloved holiday mascot — a portly papier-mache snowman with holly leaves for wings and an ice cream cone hat — had long graced the entrance to the New Orleans department store.
But times changed, and Mr. Bingle was deemed irrelevant, banished to the dark corner of a warehouse. Then, lifted by a spirit of togetherness and a rediscovered love of their city, residents banded together to return him to a place of grandeur and distinction.
That was fiction — the plot of a 2004 book, “Saving Mr. Bingle,” written by Texas author and New Orleans native Sean P. Doles. Now, just as things couldn’t get much weirder here in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the story more or less has come true.
Today, Mr. Bingle is the centerpiece of New Orleans’ holiday light festival. His triumphant return, to many in this depleted city, has helped save Christmas.
All Saints Day reviews
If you read the book, and I recommend you do…it is beyond “Twilight Zone” levels. It is where coincidence meets would-be clairvoyance on page after page.
Austin author Sean Patrick Doles isn’t as clairvoyant as his latest book makes him seem… But it’s somewhat uncanny how many details in Doles’ paperback duplicate the Hurricane Katrina disaster. It’s as if the hurricane that wiped out New Orleans, and nearly Doles’ book, was stalking the book.
…In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Doles’ new football fantasy with the timely title reads more like a news story than a “football fairy tale,” as he called it then. Doles’ descriptions of the “doomsday storm,” written months before Hurricane Katrina hit, are so close to recent reality that “some people kind of freak out when they read it,” he says.
Throw in the pope, a hurricane, questions about religious faith and a plan to move the beleaguered ball team out of state and you have a fictional story with its share of coincidences, some intended, some uncanny.
While the events of Hurricane Katrina have left many without hope, Doles said this book is not only entertaining, but will give many people who love New Orleans a feeling of home and hope.
“It’s the classic underdog story, but with a twist,” Doles said.