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Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography
 
 
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Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography (Paperback)

by David Michaelis (Author)
3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
RRP: £11.99
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Frequently Bought Together

Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography + The Complete Peanuts 1950-1952 (Peanuts) + The Complete Peanuts 1955-1956 (Book 3)
Price For All Three: £29.39

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Product details

  • Paperback: 704 pages
  • Publisher: HarperPerennial; Reprint edition (20 Oct 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0060937998
  • ISBN-13: 978-0060937997
  • Product Dimensions: 22.6 x 15.2 x 3.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 225,122 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review
'... exemplary .... rich, honest, humane and warmed by unfakeable admiration for the work.' --The Sunday Times<br /><br />Much of the book, particularly Schulz s pre-Peanuts life in Minnesota, is quite insightful and moving, a portrait of admirable American values, of self-sufficiency, discipline and hard work. The choice of cartoons is excellent. --The Sunday Telegraph

'One of the great coups of Michaelis s biography is the deftness with which he crosscuts between Schulz s life and work ... exemplary .... rich, honest, humane and warmed by unfakeable admiration for the work.' --The Sunday Times

Product Description
Charles Schulz, the most widely syndicated and beloved cartoonist of all time, is also one of the most misunderstood figures in popular culture. Now, acclaimed biographer David Michaelis gives us the first full-length biography of Schulz: at once a creation story, a portrait of a hidden genius, and a chronicle contrasting the private man with the central role he played in shaping the imagination of a generation and beyond. The son of a barber, Schulz was born in Minnesota to modest, working class roots.In 1943, just three days after his mother's tragic death from cancer, Schulz, a private in the army, shipped out for boot camp and the war in Europe. The sense of shock and separation never left him. And these early experiences would shape his entire life. With "Peanuts", Schulz embedded adult ideas in a world of small children to remind the reader that character flaws and childhood wounds are with us always. It was the central truth of his own life, that as the adults we've become and as the children we always will be, we can free ourselves, if only we can see the humor in the predicaments of funny-looking kids. Schulz's "Peanuts" profoundly influenced popular culture in the second half of the 20th century. But the strip was anchored in the collective experience and hardships of Schulz's generation-the generation that survived the Great Depression and liberated Europe and the Pacific and came home to build the postwar world.

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Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography
76% buy the item featured on this page:
Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography 3.7 out of 5 stars (3)
£8.39
The Complete Peanuts 1955-1956 (Book 3)
7% buy
The Complete Peanuts 1955-1956 (Book 3) 4.7 out of 5 stars (3)
£10.50
The Complete Peanuts 1957-1958: 4
7% buy
The Complete Peanuts 1957-1958: 4 5.0 out of 5 stars (2)
£9.79
The Complete Peanuts 1953-1954 (Peanuts): 2
5% buy
The Complete Peanuts 1953-1954 (Peanuts): 2 5.0 out of 5 stars (1)
£10.50
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Customer Reviews

3 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars A Sadly Narrow Portrait of the Artist, 6 Jan 2008
By D. Shanahan (Prague) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography (Hardcover)
For those of us who knew him, even if only in passing, this book is a big disappointment. Pretending to write a "warts and all" account - which would be welcome - Michaelis foregrounds Schulz' emotional conflicts, but does so without giving us a rounded portrait of the man. At times it is almost voyeuristic, devoting well over a hundred pages to the breakdown' of Schulz' first marriage without telling us anything new after the first ten; the second, very satisfying marriage gets little more than a factual account. More importantly, there is nothing to explain how Schulz took his anxieties and conflicts and translated them into such engaging and enduring humor. There is the pro forma suggestion that pain gives birth to art, but most of the discussion of the work is, sometimes infuriatingly, limited to the obvious, or to explications of how it illustrated the conflicts in his daily life. The author often embellishes on material to make it fit his "thesis," exposing the fact that the book is a "reading" of Charles Schulz' life, and a rather hackneyed and even gossipy one at that. Schulz,Peanuts and their serious admirers will have to wait for a real plumbing of the depths of the man who created Charlie Brown and the world they inhabited.
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Reflections of Charles M. (Sparky) Schulz Based on Peanuts Panels, 19 Nov 2007
By Professor Donald Mitchell "Jesus Makes Me a P... (Boston) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)      
This review is from: Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography (Hardcover)
Did you ever sit in one of those old-time barber shops (like the one Mr. Schulz's dad ran)? To make it easier for you to see how the hair cut was going, there were mirrors everywhere. If you looked to the left and the right, the mirrors would multiply the images so you would see hundreds of yourself.

I was reminded of that optical illusion while reading Schulz and Peanuts. When a person pens as many comic strips as Sparky Schulz did, it's inevitable that much of is in the strips will come from his life . . . and enter into his life. Author David Michaelis clearly reflected on that point and did his best to tie his book's reporting of the Schulz life to the Schulz strips. As a result, the book is literally brimming with strips and the text connects the strips back to the Schulz life or family. Seeing those strips and getting more insight into how the strips connected to the man and his family was certainly interesting. That's the strength of the book.

The weakness of the book is that this focus puts a great deal else about Mr. Schulz's life into a dark background from which little emerges. As a result, this is as flawed and incomplete a biography as you could have while having vast access to so many people and so much material.

I found the first half of the book to be much more interesting than the second half. In the book's beginning, you learn about how Mr. Schulz became a cartoonist, established Peanuts, and the inspiration behind many of the characters and situations. You also find a good description of Mr. Schulz's Christian faith. From there, the story bogs down into too much speculating about Mr. Schulz's psychology and his relationship with his first wife, Joyce. You'll also learn vastly more than you ever wanted to know about the commercial success of the Peanuts empire (after all, you probably lived through it) and various building projects by Mrs. Schulz.

Having seen this book, I think a better concept for Mr. Michaelis would have been to have written a history of the Peanuts strip and how Mr. Schulz developed the strip. The author's writing and analytical abilities didn't seem to be up to much more than that . . . while missing elements that would have been included if the scope had been narrower (such as a discussion of more of the characters and their origins).

If you don't want to get bogged down, feel free to stop reading at page 286. You'll probably like the book better if you do.
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5.0 out of 5 stars The Antipodean Point of View, 5 Nov 2008
Amongst the many reviews written on behalf of David Michaelis' "Schultz and Peanuts", some have been exclamatory while others have been critical of the author's approach to his subject. Apparently members of Charles Schulz' immediate family have also expressed bitter disappointment that the man they loved was not portrayed as they actually knew him. They believe the author has been arbitrary and has randomly used information from, and observations made during many interviews with the Schulz family and associates in order to fashion a story to fit his own theories. Indeed a lot of the criticism on all sides has been levelled at Michaelis' supposed psychological theorising as the life and behaviour of Schulz is followed from boyhood to old age. I note also that most, if not all the reviews on amazon USA have been written by American readers and fans of Schulz' cartoon 'Peanuts', and who may feel they have some ownership of both the artist and his many characters - enough in fact so as to expect a biographer to present work along the lines of their own understanding, and in a way that they themselves would like it to be.
As a New Zealander (that beautiful little country south-east of Australia) I feel I have a unique antipodean position from which to review Michaelis' biography with some objectivity, and - dare I say it - with even more admiration. 'Peanuts' appeared regularly in New Zealand newspapers from the mid 1960s and gathered a following, but not quite the devotion expressed by American readers, the reason being perhaps that in those days we in this country were not exposed so much to US customs and views of the world, and therefore to me the characters appeared to be quirky, and the story lines somewhat difficult to follow. When I discovered relatively recently that a biography had been written about the man whose name was familiar to me only as the artist of these strange, spare little cartoons, I was at once interested and also wary, knowing that the cost of importing this book might result in a huge literary disappointment to me as well as hard earned money being wasted.
I can only say that my money was not wasted, and I so enjoyed Michaelis' writing that I shall be looking for others of his books!
I think that when judging this book you have to examine what you expect from a biography. If it is the 'once-over-lightly Readers' Digest approach, "Schulz and Peanuts" is not for you. If indeed you want to know all the intimate but ordinary details of Charles Schulz' life (ie what hockey team did he follow?) then I think you are going to be disappointed
You have only to look at the first sentence in the preface to see where Michaelis is headed with the results of his research viz:"When Charles Schulz died, he left behind fifty years of clues about his life embedded in his cartoons" (p.ixP. And again in answer to an inquiry as to "...whether someone who had followed the strip from the outset'...could actually write a biographical portrait...?' Schulz answered ...'I think so...'"(p.xi). These are the observations that form the premise of Michaelis' work and they are those he perseveres with from beginning to end, using many of Schulz' cartoons to speak of their author and artist as well as the written word itself. Charles Schulz is brought to life as a warm and human personality, an observer, a very deep thinker and a man of vision and ambition who used what he did best as a means of not only interacting with his world, but also to make sense of it for himself and for others. That so many American citizens could also identify with his observations, shows that he was at once everyman in being able to touch on the aspects of American life that his followers recognised, as well as being unique in his expression of it.
For me, on this side of the globe, Michaelis has clarified much of the esotric nature of Schulz' cartoonery, and in doing so has helped me to understand the genius behind it. Certainly the approach to try to discover the real Charles Schulz IS behavioural and for some I guess is a little too theorietical and/or analytical. But when the subject himself preferred if he could to melt into the background and give very little of himself away at times, what else is a biographer to do but to look at the behaviour exhibited not only by Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, Snoopy, Peppermint Patty and others, but also that of the artist himself and begin to ask 'Why?'
Contrary to the end papers of the book, I do not think David Michaelis has written the 'definitive' biography per se. I am sure there are other aspects of Charles Schulz that could be explored - perhaps Monte Schulz might be the one to write a more personal memoir of his father in the way Chris Lemmon has done for his father Jack. But for this reader, Michaelis' book has been a revelation. Don't be put off from buying because of negative criticism from many quarters. If you enjoy good writing, good scholarship, an excellent read and an admirable attempt to relate creator and subjects, then spend your money without equivocation. Come to this book with an open mind and you will not be disappointed.
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