(Ballantine, $35)
Fans of Jim Henson can breathe easy, said David Kirby in The Washington Post. Some might have been reluctant to read Brian Jay Jones’s new biography for fear that it would reveal skeletons in the closet of a childhood idol. “Not to worry.” Henson made a few professional mistakes and once sampled LSD, but “if the life of the man who created the Muppets had been any cornier or more wholesome, he would have been sued by Norman Rockwell’s lawyers for plagiarism.” A child of the suburbs who fell in love with the early possibilities of television, Henson emerges on these pages as a mild-mannered but imaginative workaholic who accomplished an astonishing amount in 53 short years.
Jones’s book “could border on hagiography, were it not so easy to believe,” said Erik Adams in the A.V. Club. Henson’s life, from his stint as a teenage puppeteer for a local TV station though his success with Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, easily fills the book’s 600 pages. Henson could be a clever businessmen at times, though his geniality occasionally got the better of him: He once started a meeting intent on firing a performer but ended the talk by delivering nothing harsher than a bear hug. His ambitions stretched well beyond puppetry, said Luke Epplin in The Atlantic. His only Oscar nomination came for “Time Piece,” a surreal and nearly dialogue-free 1965 short, and he also dabbled in music and even nightclub ownership. “As Jones expertly shows, Henson remained throughout his life an artist who was constantly in motion.”
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Unfortunately, “Jones never quite exposes the soul of his subject,” said Michael Merschel in The Dallas Morning News. We learn that Henson wasn’t an entirely faithful husband and that his death from a strep infection could be characterized as a case of a man working himself into an early grave, but the “sweetly mystical” artist we come to know remains “almost flawless.” Still, “this is a biography that earns the label ‘definitive.’” Maybe only true Henson fans will appreciate the level of detail it provides, but that’s okay. After all, there are a lot of us.
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