I’m not alone. A 2010 post about “The Giving Tree” in this paper’s MotherLode blog, “Children’s Books You (Might) Hate,” attracted more than 300 comments. A passionate and very vocal minority of reviewers on sites like Amazon and Goodreads seems to find the story an affront not just to literature but to humanity itself. “Most disgusting book ever,” said one. “One star or five, there is no middle ground,” declared another. “The Nazis would have loved it,” one man raged, proving that everything up to and including beloved children’s picture books will eventually fall prey to Godwin’s Law — that as an online discussion grows, so does the likelihood that someone or something will be compared to a Nazi.

For those who need a recap: Boy meets adoring, obliging apple tree and eventually, through a combination of utter impotence and blatant manipulation, makes off with her branches, her trunk and, of course, the literal fruits of her labor. (I’m not even going to get into the biblical implications of Silverstein’s decision to make the tree of the book’s title apple-bearing.) “And the tree was happy,” reads the last line of the 52-page story, a sentiment repeated by Silverstein so many times that it sends some, like me, into paroxysms of reflexive indignation.

Of course, maybe we’re just projecting, but to those who would say that Silverstein’s book is a moving, sentimental depiction of the unyielding love of a parent for a child, I’d say, Learn better parenting skills. To those who defend it as a warts-and-all parable lamenting man’s inhumanity to man — or, perhaps, man’s inhumanity to woman — I’d say that I’m not so sure Silverstein, who dedicated the book to a former girlfriend, “Nicky,” was writing an indictment of what men assume they can get way with. The boy uses the tree as a plaything, lives off her like a parasite, and then, when she’s a shell of her former self and no longer serves any real purpose, he sits on her — which makes her happy? (“That book is the epitome of male privilege,” a friend groused.)

As for the argument that “The Giving Tree” is somehow a commentary on the ways humans ravage the environment, I mean, maybe? The tree of Silverstein’s imagination, unlike most other trees felled by humans, suffers mightily but never dies, left to live out her years as a five-fingered stump, abandoned in the grass like the orphaned foot of a gentle sauropod. After a brief consultation with the dinosaur expert Bob Strauss about that analogy, Strauss, without prompting, declared his disgust for the book. “I refuse to read it to my kids or my friends’ kids,” he wrote in an email. “I think that book has done more damage to fragile young psyches than any other kids’ book in the last 50 years. (O.K., maybe I’m exaggerating a bit, but you get the idea.)”

It’s possible Silverstein was attempting to be subversive, and in that sense, this little Rorschach test of children’s literature seems to have succeeded. Readers cite it as a cautionary tale regarding both the social welfare state and the obscenity that is late-stage capitalism. Betsey Stevenson, the economist and Obama administration appointee, reads the book to her children and says it creates a space “to have a conversation about what it means to take, and to give, too much.” That said, she doesn’t buy the “And the tree was happy” nonsense either. “If she had said no when he wanted her branches, would the boy have gone off and become a better person?” Stevenson wonders. “I don’t want to hold the tree accountable,” she continued, but she thinks there could have been a happier ending: “If only she’d set limits, she wouldn’t be a stump today!”