This is the book that started it all The basis for the smash hit Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, Gregory Maguire's breathtaking New York Times bestseller Wicked views the land of Oz, its inhabitants, its Wizard, and the Emerald City, through a darker and greener (not rosier) lens. Brilliantly inventive, Wicked offers us a radical new evaluation of one of the most feared and hated characters in all of literature: the much maligned Wicked Witch of the West who, as Maguire tells us, wasn't nearly as Wicked as we imagined.

An examination of the forces that attracted many social and intellectual leaders of 18th-century Russia to Freemasonry as an instrument for change and progress. By working the rough stone of their inner thoughts and feelings, such men sought to become champions of moral enlightenment and to create a vision of social action that could bring about change without challenging the social and political precepts on which Russia's stability depended.