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Schulz and Peanuts
A Biography
کتاب های مرتبط
- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
- دیدگاه کاربران
نقد و بررسی
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David Michaelis's biography of "Peanuts" cartoonist Charles Schulz is at once the most joyful and saddest book of 2007. Holter Graham does a superb job telling the rags-to-riches story of a man whose work appears so simple, until the reader looks deeper. Even Graham must have had a knot in his throat while recounting Schulz's final days when he admits his regret that "the little guy never got to kick the football." Schulz was one of history's most successful cartoonists, parlaying his strip into a billion-dollar industry that continues after his death. Yet the intelligent, driven man was sometimes depressed and always unfulfilled. The fact that for five decades he produced all those amazing cartoons in spite of these emotional issues makes him even more impressive. M.S. 2008 Audies Finalist (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
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Starred review from July 23, 2007
For all the joy Charlie Brown and the gang gave readers over half a century, their creator, Charles Schulz, was a profoundly unhappy man. It's widely known that he hated the name Peanuts, which was foisted on the strip by his syndicate. But Michaelis (N.C. Wyeth: A Biography
), given access to family, friends and personal papers, reveals the full extent of Schulz's depression, tracing its origins in his Minnesota childhood, with parents reluctant to encourage his artistic dreams and yearbook editors who scrapped his illustrations without explanation. Nearly 250 Peanuts strips are woven into the biography, demonstrating just how much of his life story Schulz poured into the cartoon. In one sequence, Snoopy's crush on a girl dog is revealed as a barely disguised retelling of the artist's extramarital affair. Michaelis is especially strong in recounting Schulz's artistic development, teasing out the influences on his unique characterization of children. And Michaelis makes plain the full impact of Peanuts' first decades and how much it puzzled and unnerved other cartoonists. This is a fascinating account of an artist who devoted his life to his work in the painful belief that it was all he had. 16 pages of b&w photos; 240 b&w comic strips throughout.
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December 24, 2007
Holter Graham's reading is clear and well paced, and he makes good use of pauses and emphasis for emotional effect as we peer into the miserable life a genius—the fabulously successful and enormously influential creator of the Peanuts gang. Schulz thought of himself as ordinary rather than brilliant, as “melancholy” rather than “depressed.” But no kind of unhappiness ever interfered with his 50 years of daily cartooning. Michaelis shows us that “o the very end, his life had been inseparable from his art” and that his art reflected not only his own changing thought and circumstances but also America's political and social shifts from one decade to the next. There are two minor limitations to the audio version: it's missing the 240 Peanuts
strips that illustrated and illuminated Michaelis's text, and one wishes that this captivating and well-researched biography had been unabridged. Schulz's very last Peanuts
strip was published the day he died. Simultaneous release with the Harper hardcover (Reviews, July 23).
دیدگاه کاربران