Customer Reviews

My Life with Charlie Brown

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a collection of writings by Charles M. Schulz who won fame and fortune by his creation of Peanuts, a cartoon strip still read by millions of people ten years after his untimely death. Most of the writings have been published already in various magazines or came from speeches he made many years ago before his death in 2000. Few are unpublished notations. All that have been complied into this one book. This book allowed the reader to look into Schulz's life, his creation and his outlook in an almost autobiographical term. Its a very reflective book on Charles Schulz as he writes mostly about himself and his experiences. Its a short book, 193 pages including the index. The man who edited this book is M. Thomas Inge. In case some of you do not know, he also edited another book titled "Charles M. Schulz Conversations", a book that complied many of Schulz's best interviews.

If you combined both books, you will probably get a very interesting, insightful and informative understanding of Charles Schulz as a man, as a cartoonist and as a human being. They are probably closest thing you can have to an autobiography.

Of course, the only reason why this book did not received five stars is that few entries in this book have already published in another book titled "Peanuts Jubilee" by Charles M. Schulz (who else?) that was published back in 1975. I still owned that book so I thought maybe Mr. Inge could have chosen a different set of entries. Its one thing to take an article here or there from various magazines but from another Peanuts book is something else.

For anyone interested in Charles M. Schulz and his creation, I guess I can say that reading this book would be a no brainer. Reading it with "Charles M. Schulz Conversations" will allow you to get the facts from straight from the source. While not a perfect format, this would have to do until some one can do real justice to Schulz by writing a real biography!

This was a good book. I really enjoyed it. I learned a lot about Charles Schulz, his life, and the strip. Peanuts is one of my favorite strips ever. The book even has a few comics inside of it. It has autobiographical essays, introductions, articles, reviews, and lectures that tell the personal tale of The Peanuts creator and America's greatest comic strip. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who loves Peanuts. Again if you are Peanuts fan than this is the book for you. Enjoy.

It is a sad commentary on our society that the sensationalist, opportunist, and prurient "accounting" of Schulz's life a few years ago could elicit so much sales, attention and publicity, while this one languishes in relative obscurity. But if you're a true fan of good ol' Charlie Brown (and know why to avoid calling it "Peanuts"), I cannot recommend any book more strongly than this one to learn about who Charles Schulz was.

This book is essentially a collection of speeches, essays, interviews, and other first person accounts which Schulz gave in his lifetime. Those who claim that Schulz was some kind of brooding, withdrawn tragic figure who kept to himself are looking through the prism of today's tabloid society where an inquisitive public must know the deepest darkest secrets of anyone with any kind of celebrity status. Especially for the era that Schulz lived, he was exceptionally giving and remarkably open about sharing wisdom and "trade secrets" to help others, especially aspiring artists and cartoonists.

Throughout this book we learn the things real fans of Schulz care about. His influences as a child and young adult, from playing sports as a child to his struggles in school to his military service. The role faith played in his life. How the strip got started and evolved over time. His daily routine in drawing the strip. His relationship and occasional frustrations with his syndicate. The real inspiration behind many of the characters and how they developed over time. How he got new ideas and over the years introduced new concepts and story lines into the strip. His surprise at the public reaction to strips such as when Linus and Lucy moved out of the neighborhood, and when Sally told her brother that she prayed in school.

Ironically for an autobiography, the accounts through these 50 years of collected writings reads much more objectively than any of the biographies published about Schulz, both the recent one and the one that preceded it. I think this is because Schulz speaks with such transparency and honesty that anyone who attempts to tell the "true story" of Schulz ends up looking foolish. If you've ever seen Schulz talk, you can almost hear his voice

There was one passage I read a few years ago in an essay that's reprinted in this book that literally changed my life. In it, Schulz is speaking to a group of high school students and gives them the advice "Go home tonight and ask your parents where they met. Ask you dad what he did in World War II. Ask your mom if she went to the high-school prom. Talk to your grandmother, and don't just let the thing die, pursue the questioning. Do it now before it's too late." I read this while I still in high school myself. I decided to talk to my dad and my mom and ask them about their lives, and they both told me amazing stories that left me speechless about growing up and coming to this country. I wrote down all the details. A year or two later, my mom passed away. Shortly after that, my dad had a massive stroke that left him unable to speak. In a very real way, I owe Charles Schulz a great debt of thanks for speaking these words.

I've always said that the best way to understand who Schulz was is just to read the strip, which is being reprinted in its entirety in the excellent set of "The Complete Peanuts" books by Fantagraphics. Schulz himself says in one of these essays that the strip and each and every one if its characters are all reflections of his own personality, his experiences, his philosophy. This book is a close second.

I'm a huge fan of Peanuts and the character Charlie Brown in particular. While it is insightful to hear Mr. Schulz speak on the topic, the excerpts used are extremely narrow in nature and repetitive, therefore the content is not substantial enough to exist in book format. It would be nice to hear "Sparky's" view points outside of the comic world, perhaps include interviews of people that knew him and maybe even some visuals of never before seen characters or content.