Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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104 of 119 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good grief! What a trove of insight and information!, October 18, 2007
Growing up in a relentlessly secular home in the '60s, "Peanuts" was my true north, providing and deconstructing my own ongoing puzzlement about how people felt and thought. I read the comic in the daily papers, hoarded my pennies to buy the collected volumes, and even then, thought that Charles M. "Sparky" Schulz must have shared many of his characters' quirks, dilemmas, joys, and despondencies.
After reading this absorbing biography by David Michaelis, I now know that as a child I'd chosen the right person to provide a daily guide to childhood and the mysteries of adulthood. Michaelis provides a comprehesive back story, having spoken to amd corresponded with hundreds of Schulz's relatives, friends, neighbors, buddies from his childhood in Minnesota and during his stint as a "foot soldier" in World War II. After syndication made Sparky world-famous, writers, artists, and performers sought to meet Schulz, but his innate shyness made it difficult to reach out to other people. Michaelis hesitates to play snap psychologist with his subject, but does conclude that a lifelong unhappiness--despite his cataclysmic success--and intermittent agoraphobia encouraged Schulz to stay where he felt most comfortable: at his drawing board in his home studio.
Some of Schulz's intimates have expressed disappointment at the finished product, but any public exposure of mostly-private persons is difficult, no doubt about it. This author's sensitive eye waded through bales of information (some never-before published, such as several days spent visiting and talking with novelist Laurie Colwin), and fifty years of daily cartoon strips to create a balanced, fair portrait of a man, his romances, marriages, work, and the situations that molded Sparky (his lifelong nickname) as well as his characters, known and loved throughout the world. Dozens of strips and drawings are reproduced here to illustrate their relation to the cartoonist's private struggles as they were drawn. And when Schulz died of colon cancer just as his final strip was published, the synergy between timid Sparky and the media empire he created concluded. Hollywood certainly couldn't top this painfully true saga.
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21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Penetrating Portrait Exposes Personal Flaws But Effectively Highlights His Unique Brilliance, October 30, 2007
It should come as no surprise that Charles Schulz was a more complex man than he always described himself to be, and author David Michaelis digs deep in his comprehensive, incisive biography to explore the legendary cartoonist's psyche which so successfully informed all the characters in his Peanuts strip. In fact, it's difficult to think of Peanuts as just a comic strip since Schulz accumulated over $1 billion dollars in merchandising revenue by 1989. Even after his death in February 2000, he remains among the top ten highest-earning celebrities who happen to be dead. However, of far more importance to the reader of this book is the legacy he leaves behind in introducing characters who were both naturally contemplative and shrewdly observant, a unique combination that highlighted the universality of their yearning humanism.
Peanuts (a name, by the way, Schulz apparently detested) may have started life as a simple daily newspaper panel in 1950, but his life up to that point was certainly no cartoon. Michaelis details a childhood fraught with personal grief and emotional isolation. His father was the local barber and his mother a housewife, genealogical facts that Schulz would apply to Charlie Brown. Unlike his cartoon counterpart, however, the subject grew highly dependent on his mother who died of cervical cancer when he was twenty, and his emotionally distant father was too preoccupied to fill in the gaping hole she left behind. According to the author, this tragedy left Schulz feeling highly insecure and shaping an idiosyncratic perspective on the world that is best described as half-empty. The key distinction in Schulz's situation, however, is that he deliberately constructed a public image as a boyishly shy and rather dull loser in order to insulate himself from further emotional pain. He was determined to protect himself from others whom he felt could destroy his sense of personal and later professional self.
For all this self-effacement, Schulz had a keen ambition and a healthy ego. How else could one explain how he sustained such a massive personal fortune from his work? Schulz confessed at one point later in his life, "I suppose I'm the worst kind of egotist...the kind who pretends to be humble." Even he realized that this was not a self-contradictory state but one that fueled him toward sometimes harsh decisions that confused others around him. How this internal dynamic manifested itself is what Michaelis carefully documents in the book, for example, how someone with such a close affinity to children never showed much affection to his own children. His deep-seeded faith reflected the same personal conflict as Schulz viewed himself as an evangelical Christian, one who made a habit of giving ten percent of his hefty income to his church. At the same time, he turned his back on organized religion and embarked on an indiscriminate affair with a magazine photographer well into his marriage to a woman already subjected to the delusional torch he carried for the "Little Red-Haired Girl" from years before. Even his inarguable professional stature was not enough to prevent him from threatening to ruin a competitor late in his career.
Regardless, through his relatively objective narrative, Michaelis is far less interested in providing a gossipy tell-all than describing in penetrating detail the psychological impetus which pushed Schulz to excel at his profession like no one else before or since. The author more than counterbalances the negative revelations of his subject by describing Schulz's generosity toward the next generation of cartoonists, in particular, Cathy Guisewite ("Cathy"). For all that, the most important aspect of Schulz's talent was his unerring sense in economically capturing the zeitgeist of the times in which the characters inhabited from the post-WWII prosperity felt in the 1950's through the existential questions raised in the 1960's and the subsequent evolving need to find a deeper meaning of life. Michaelis is smart enough to focus on that particular gift by way of 240 Peanuts strips carefully chosen to illuminate his points. Like any good biographer, he lets Schulz speak for himself through his work.
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"But what about the king?", November 9, 2007
It's always frustrating when something that you know you're supposed to like disappoints you. I'm a lifelong Peanuts fan, charter member of the Charles M. Schulz Museum, and an avid reader of biographies, so this book seems like it should be tailor-made for me. I'd been eagerly waiting for it ever since it was first announced in 2000, although the various objections of the Schulz family in the weeks before the release tempered that a little bit. So, I have to say: this is a worthy but deeply flawed biography.
The title is "Schulz and Peanuts", but a more accurate title might be "Some Aspects of Schulz and How They Relate to Some Aspects of Peanuts". For an exhaustively researched 600-page book about a man who lived to be 77, Michaelis has written a curiously narrow book. Obviously, there's an incredible amount to cover in Schulz's life (Michaelis' rough draft was almost 1200 pages long and he briefly thought about dividing the book into two volumes), but Michaelis just keeps hitting all the same notes over and over: Schulz was unhappy, Schulz had a chip on his shoulder, Schulz never recovered from his mother's tragic death, Schulz used shyness as an excuse to avoid taking risks, Schulz had dysfunctional relationships with women, and on and on. And for a book about a humorist, there's very little humor in here, although some of the situations Michaelis describes play out like Peanuts strips involving adults. As for the complaints of Schulz's family, I'm obviously not in a position to say what's accurate in the book and what isn't. But I certainly can see where, as Schulz's son Monte has claimed, Michaelis might have ignored facts that went against his thesis. This isn't a Kitty Kelley/Albert Goldman hatchet job bio, but I think Michaelis' approach is a bit misguided.
I found this a somewhat difficult book to get through. Michaelis approaches his biographies like novels. But, in this case, it reads like a first novel by a talented-but-obtuse writer: heavy-handed, full of show-offy prose that ultimately doesn't do much for the story. When he shuts up and sticks to telling the story (Schulz's army years, his early years in California, his final days), it's a brilliant book. When Michaelis decides he's writing a book-length New Yorker essay, then we have problems. I just got the feeling after a while that Michaelis ultimately didn't understand Schulz, and held him to an impossible standard. The "Peanuts" part of the book comes into play with reprints of hundreds of strips that reflect the events of Schulz's life. It's a great idea. So great that Schulz himself already used it (in the 1985 book You Don't Look 35, Charlie Brown). While you get a sense of how Schulz converted his life into his art, Michaelis doesn't deal with the strip much beyond that. We only get a few token paragraphs discussing how the strip evolved over time, and notable characters like Peppermint Patty, Marcie, Sally and Rerun barely get mentioned at all. Michaelis sees Peanuts as a direct reflection of Schulz's life, but he doesn't allow for the idea that Schulz used his own life as a starting point for his art, but then allowed it to evolve on its own. Meanwhile, Michaelis devotes pages and pages to painstakingly detailed accounts of Schulz's various merchandising deals.
Still, I give it 4 stars for a simple reason: if the goal of a biography is to make you understand the subject, I feel like I got a better sense of what made Schulz tick than I had before. But I would recommend reading Rheta Grimsley Johnson's "Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz" before you read this book, since it gives you the basic outline of the story, and gives you more or less the "official" version of the Schulz story. Actually, I guess the "official" version would be any random collection of Peanuts strips. While the life of its creator is fascinating, we must never forget that it's "Peanuts", not "Schulz" that matters in the end.
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