Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography

This seemed to me to be a fair and overwhelmingly positive portrait of Schulz. I'm not sure what his kids are upset about--so Dad was generally melancholy and a bit removed. What do they think made him a cartoon genius? And his love for them and for his wives is also quite palpable. The stories about where all the ideas and characters for Peanuts came from are quite entertaining. The story of A Charlie Brown Christmas alone is quite revealing. I was rather disappointed not to hear a bit more about the business end of things--how Peanuts became an industry and how Schultz's characters wound up selling snack cakes and life insurance and all that. There's an amazing business story that's not told here, and the author suggests that that's because Schultz himself sort of let it happen via his surrogates rather than directing it himself. But that seems a bit of a copout. On the other hand, the book is quite long enough, there's no real dross here, so I can't complain too much. Recommended.

Although this biography is fascinating, there is too much of a focus on the gruesome cancer Schulz's mother had and too much pseudo psychiatry about him being the loner type.
It was great to hear how he developed his cartooning craft and how sheer persistence helped him win through.

When reading the Peanuts cartoons, I often wondered if the characters were in any way developed from children or people Mr. Schulz knew.
It was interesting to learn they were so interrelated with Mr. Schulz' own family and friends.

It was also interesting to read about Mr. Schulz' life.

A very interesting book. Schulz was very unlike I would have imagined from his cartoons, which I think are wonderful.

A somewhat dry biography, this book gives the reader amazing insight into the eccentric Schultz. If you are a 'Peanuts' fan then you will appreciate learning how the strip's characters came to be and why they act they way that they do.

I enjoyed every chapter of the book. from beginning to the end.

There were a lot of memorable moments. I liked to hear about his childhood and and his pitching Peanuts to the syndicates. The last days of his life were very sad.

Holter Graham did a fantastic job

I choked up towards the end

Being a cartoonist myself, Charles Schulz has been an inspration my whole life. This book was well written. It gave me great Insight to this man and the strip I've adored all my life.

After hearing about this book from my wife I thought this book would have been full of all kinds of crazy sex cheating. He stayed with his difficult oppressive wife for 20 years and they grew apart, oh well... not the sex filed tabloid it was made out to be. Don't understand why the family is upset, Schulz was AMAZING... the book does a great service to him and I think he would have liked it if he had read it. 50 years of Peanuts, holy crap! A must read for any cartoonist or animation fan.

For those of us who grew up reading Peanuts, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, and Lucy seemed like real people. They were, in reality, products from the imagination of Charles Schulz. Michaelis does an excellent job of revealing the man behind the strip.
It is a three dimensional picture of a very talented man who found his true love, cartooning, at an early age. He had a difficult time dealing with the messier aspects of life, and retreated from them. In the end, the Peanuts characters seemed more real to him than the people who surrounded him. It is a sympathetic portrayal, but it does not canonize Schulz.
IIRC, the book was somewhat controversial when it came out, as it covered two extramarital affairs by Schulz and his oldest daughter's abortion. These are discussed.
Of more interest is the description of the characters from the strip and their real life influences. Lucy, for example, was representative of his first wife. In her relationship with Charlie Brown, she berated him and pulled the football away from him. With Schroeder, she smothered him with love, but he was oblivious, and quite happy without her. Both of these were aspects of their married life. An excellent listen, and the reader is good.

Whenever I read biographies of famous characters (Johnny Carson, Katherine Hepburn, etc.) I am dissappointed. This was no exception. It is interesting to find out about these people, but not a good read.

I had heard this was a five star book, so I may be underrating it in my disappointment. I did learn about the "semiotics" of comics and will read comics differently in future. As for the portrait of Schultz, I thought there not enough substance for the length of the listen. My rule of thumb is, if I can absorb a book on fast play while doing something else (which I could with this bio), it should be written more concisely. Michaelis offers a psychological portrait of Schultz, but in audio format, it's hard to judge the quality; for ex., what were his chief sources versus how much was just conjecture based on "Sat. Eve. Post" and "Life" features?

There is some good social history rounding out the personal portrait, but the portrayal of one important historical point irked me: Michaelis propagates the Hiroshima myth: that is, that millions of Americans (including perhaps Schultz) would have died in the Pacific theatre of WWII if A bombs had not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Declassified docs show clearly that Japan was ready to surrender before A bomb, and now most historians agree the A bomb was primarily a show of strength to Russia for post war dominance. If the author got that detail wrong, what else might he have?

There was more than enough of the commercial side of the Peanuts franchise for my taste, unlike a reviewer below.