The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, by L. Frank Baum, read by Cindy Hardin Killavey. Unabridged, 3½ hours. Jimcin Recordings, $16.95.

The Wizard of Oz was hardly the only book Baum wrote. Besides that book’s many sequels, he also wrote a number of other stories, including this 1902 tale of how Santa and his magical powers came to be.

The story has both the charm and clunkiness of fantasies of its era, such as Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz. The language is more baroque and wordy than we’re used to, but at the same time there’s a lot of imagination at work, as Baum creates whole races of fairies, gnomes and magical woodsfolk who help Santa — originally, in this telling, just plain Claus — along the way.

Ultimately, it’s the charm that wins out, as Baum’s clever concepts begin to take hold. Claus is a foundling in an enchanted forest, a normal boy adopted by a wood nymph and grown to manhood. Almost by accident, he begins to make toys, and finds his life’s calling in delighting children. And then come a pair of immortal reindeer. …

This audio version is the work of Rhode Islanders Jim and Cindy Killavey, who sell it through their Jimcin Recordings (P.O. Box 536, Portsmouth, RI 02871). There are a few places where the sound quality isn’t quite right, but the problems don’t detract much. And veteran storyteller Cindy Killavey is a warm presence as she recounts the tale, doing especially well with the voices of small children to whom Claus has pledged to bring joy.

The Real All Americans: The Team that Changed a Game, a People, a Nation, by Sally Jenkins, read by David Pittu. Abridged, 6 hours. Random House Audio, $29.95.

To say that this is the story of Jim Thorpe and the early-20th-century Carlisle Indians football team is like saying that Gone With the Wind is about a couple of lovers in a difficult era. It’s true, but there’s so much more going on here.

Jenkins is really telling a story about America’s Indian tribes, and the end of the era in which they fought to maintain their tribal lands and wound up humbled.

In 1879, an Army man, Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt, decided that Indians could and should be educated for a place in the broader American society — a controversial proposition, both among whites who believed that “savages” were racially inferior, and among Indians dismayed at the notion of sending young people off to “become white.” And in fact, that was more or less what Pratt had in mind. He cut off his students’ braids, put them in army-style uniforms, and established the federally funded Carlisle Indian Industrial School in a small Pennsylvania town, far from the vast reservations of the West.

Custer’s disastrous adventure at Little Big Horn was only three years in the past. The massacre of Indians at Wounded Knee lay 11 years in the future.

It’s against this background that football enters the picture. The game was brutal — dozens of young men would die on college fields in the first few decades of collegiate play — but it was viewed as a crucible in which well-bred fellows could prove their manliness. The nation’s best programs were at Harvard, Yale and other Ivy institutions. And after a period of hesitation, Pratt decided that success on the football field was something he wanted for Carlisle.

After experimenting with a couple of Yale men, Pratt hired Glenn S. “Pop” Warner, after whom youth football leagues across the nation would eventually be named. Warner was not yet a legend; it was at Carlisle that he would develop the single-wing and double-wing formations, the reverse and the passing game (despite the widespread later crediting of an emphasis on passing to Notre Dame). And it was there that he would coach Thorpe, the eventually disgraced 1912 Olympian whose gridiron heroics capped the era of Carlisle football.

Carlisle’s players were almost always smaller than their opponents’, but they tended to be faster, smarter and tougher. Thorpe, whose speed and ability to jump were jaw-dropping, was just one of a number of outstanding players with whom Warner found increasing success, even though whites looked askance and referees often clearly sided against the Indians.

Thorpe’s football career, and that of Carlisle, reached their peak in a 1912 game against Army. The military academy was just emerging as a football power, but to the Indians on the Carlisle team it was far more. These were the nation’s future military leaders, Dwight D. Eisenhower among them. The chance for Indians to compete on the playing field for the first time against the army that had destroyed their tribes’ freedom was an event not to be duplicated.

Jenkins’ book doesn’t accomplish quite as much as its subtitle would suggest, but she does a fine job of storytelling and analyzing a bruising era. She’s especially good at showing the world in which the Indians tried to survive by sending their children to Carlisle, and the ways in which that world conspired to hold those children back.

Pittu’s reading offers variation among the voices of coaches, players, chiefs and even Theodore Roosevelt, who was less than impressed with Pratt and ended up firing him in the early 1900s.

Igraine the Brave, by Cornelia Funke, read by Xanthe Elbrick. Unabridged, 4½ hours. Listening Library, $28.

Igraine may be only 12 years old, but when her magician parents accidentally turn themselves into pigs, just as an evil knight swoops in from the castle next door, she has to spring into action.

Who else is going to get the giant’s hairs needed to help reverse the erroneous spell? Who else is going to free a neighbor imprisoned by the evil knight? And who else is going to try to sneak into the enemy camp with the goal of undoing an enchantment that threatens a friend?

Igraine may be fearless — well, almost — but she’s also headstrong and bickers with her magician older brother, Albert, making her seem real in a fanciful sort of way. And even though this children’s novel leaves little doubt as to its ultimate outcome, getting there is lots of good fun.

Funke, who also wrote Dragon Rider and the Inkheart books, created Igraine in 1998, but good children’s stories are timeless. And Elbrick, Tony-nominated this year for her performance in Coram Boy, makes distinct individuals of Igraine and Albert, their piggy parents and the woeful knight who comes to their rescue.

Before I Die, by Jenny Downham, read by Charlotte Parry. Unabridged, 7 hours. Listening Library, $34.

Tessa is dying of leukemia. But before the London 16-year-old goes — and she knows she doesn’t have much time — there are things she wants to do.

Having sex for the first time is at the top of the list. Taking drugs and committing crimes are right there, too. And so is falling in love.

In fact, there are 10 things on Tessa’s list, and with the help of her friend Zoey, she means to do them all. But her sad-eyed father and clingy little brother stand in her way. So does her physical condition.

Tessa is by turns angry, resigned and thoughtless as she makes her way through her list, and as her health worsens. And when she begins to be attracted to Adam, the Scottish slacker next door, he’s not exactly thrilled at first. Getting to know someone who’s dying, he says, would be a waste of time.

And if, in this teen novel, Adam’s eventual change of heart is inevitable, it’s nonetheless well-written. Parents may want to think twice about the book’s sexual frankness, in which little is left to the imagination. But there’s a clear message, too, that sex without love is meaningless.

Parry, a theatrical actress, has a lovely way with the voices of Adam, his bewildered mother, Tessa’s eager little brother and, most importantly, Tessa.

Alan Rosenberg is The Journal’s South County regional editor.