Over at Salon, Charles Taylor has an excellent rebuttal of A.S. Byatt's utterly patronizing review of the new Harry Potter in the New York Times.

One part I wish he had addressed however. He quotes her saying "complaining that Rowling's form of magic is ersatz. "Ursula K. Le Guin's wizards inhabit an anthropologically coherent world where magic really does act as a force," Byatt writes. "Ms. Rowling's magic wood has nothing in common with these lost worlds. It is small, and on the school grounds, and dangerous only because she says it is."

That's utter nonsense. Magic is clearly presented as extremely dangerous on and off Hogwarts grounds. Voldemort kills various people, burrowing into their memories and turning them into helpless morons. In Pheonix we meet some of these people and see first hand what he has done to families, including the Longbottoms.

And Rowling also presnts a disturbing example of why magic is forcefully contained within the wizarding world. The scene at the beginning of Goblet of Fire where a group of Death Eaters tortures a Muggle family for sport at a Quidditch match is horrifying.