This had been sitting on my TBR list for years and I’m so glad I finally picked it up. I loved Peanuts (along with Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side, Bloom County, and Doonesbury—sigh! for the golden age of comics) as a kid, so getting the behind-the-scenes story was really exciting, and I liked the way David Michaelis analyzes the comic strip through the biographical lens (comics are interspersed with the text to underscore certain points). And although I knew Schulz was Minnesotan, I’d never really realized that his childhood home and his father’s barbershop were at the corner of Selby and Snelling in St. Paul, just 1.5 miles from where I grew up (I even took violin lessons in the same building where Schulz attended elementary school decades before) and half a mile from the apartment I lived in as an adult, so the entire story of his background had a special resonance to me.
I didn’t always love Michaelis’s writing style—it tended toward the melodramatic/psychoanalytic at times—and the depiction of Schulz’s later life started to meander, but for the most part I was absolutely riveted. It’s a warts-and-all portrayal of a complicated man who wasn’t always the warm and fuzzy person his fans hoped for, but for some reason I felt a deep sympathy for him...even when his biographer didn’t always seem to. Furthermore, I’m grateful to have been reminded of how good Peanuts used to be and how much it meant to me.
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