“Zazu Dreams bursts forth from its cover, showering the reader with art, song, language, spirituality, joy, and history. In the spirit of Le Petit Prince, the door to adult reflection is opened by a child guide.

With the query, 'Who needs imaginary monsters or giants or evil empires when corporations like Nestle and PepsiCo, Merck and Monsanto destroy everything in their path?' Zazu Dreams challenges us with the notion that knowledge of evil, even for the very young, is the clearest path to good. From climate change to Big Oil, war to slavery, Zazu faces the worst of humanity, while simultaneously basking in the beauty that constantly amazes and surrounds, teaching that we must live in harmony with and as caretakers of this earth and all upon it, if we wish the same in return.

Three generations take us on a journey to be enjoyed by all ages. A grandmother’s artwork joins a mother’s story telling to create an adventure for her son into what it means to be human that is unrestricted by space, time or prejudice, only his—and through him our own—limitless imagination.

“ ANTONIA JUHASZ, author of The Tyranny of Oil. Zazu Dreams is a tale about the adventures of a Sephardic boy and his imaginary friend, a malamute husky, as they traverse the globe on a humpback whale across time and space, experiencing the marvels and mayhem of the relationship between humans and their environments (human ecologies).

Crossing temporal dimensions and international borders, past, present, and future overlap through phantasmagorical encounters with historical figures like Jacques Cousteau, Spinoza, Rachel Carson, and ibn Sina. For cross-generational audiences, Zazu Dreams includes lush illustrations and detailed endnotes (“The 21st Century Arcades Project”).

Together, the narrative, images, and Arcades unravel the intersections between the sciences and humanities—global ecological extinction and cultural extinction of ethnic minorities. Zazu Dreams explores migration and transformation from waste to useful by-product—including toxic sludge to critical compost, desertification to oasis, cusp of extinction to restoration, body-phobia to biophilia.

Symbiotic relationships from the natural world coincide with the histories of diasporic peoples from Iberia, North Africa, and the Middle East. The authors integrate two seemingly unrelated topics: Jewish and Arabic philosophies with consumer-convenience petro-culture.

This cautionary fable incites transgenerational audiences to question the vast implications of the vital yet precarious concept of “sustainability. ”.