Charles M. Schulz died a bitter man, says author David Michaelis. The 77-year-old creator of Peanuts was enormously wealthy. Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the rest of the grade-school gang he had drawn for half a century were adored by millions, and he was arguably the most popular American artist in history. But as cancer weakened him at the end of 1999, Schulz appeared to one friend to be “angry at God, angry with friends,” and “angry with fate.” Though surrounded by his children and other loved ones, he was oddly preoccupied with bullies he’d known in childhood, and with the wish that he had been able to get revenge.
Michaelis’ probing new biography shows us a Schulz some fans might rather not meet, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. Michaelis certainly likes Schulz well enough. But he refuses to endorse the simplistic notion that Charlie Brown, a quietly noble playground nobody, was Schulz. What made Peanuts a revolutionary comic strip was that its other characters were “capable of shocking cruelty and coldness”—traits Schulz had in himself. Michaelis traces the cartoonist’s brooding to a Midwest upbringing shaped by a withholding father and a “cool, even mocking” mother, said Charles McGrath in The New York Times. Once that theme is established, the old Peanuts strips that Michaelis includes come to seem “almost transparently autobiographical.” Yes, Schulz gave his somber disposition to Charlie Brown. But he’s also the oddball philosopher Linus, the distant artist Schroeder, and “above all” the daydreaming, perpetually underestimated Snoopy. In short, Schulz possessed an “adolescent sensibility,” and it served his strip well.
Michaelis misses some opportunities to highlight the strip’s generosity of spirit, said Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, in The Wall Street Journal. He shows us how bossy Lucy served as a stand-in for Schulz’s first wife, for instance, but not how Schulz rendered her as a tragic figure as well. However imperfect a man Schulz was, his cartoons “had real heart.” What made Peanuts so special was Schulz’s “sweetly melancholic depiction of the human condition,” said Sharon Begley in Newsweek. Despite its minor missteps, Michaelis’ portrait of Schulz provides a “compelling” and convincing road map to the sources of that vision.
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War
by Bob Drogin
(Random House, $26.95)
The entire war in Iraq can be blamed on the lies of a down-and-out Baghdad engineer, says investigative reporter Bob Drogin. In 1999, long before the world knew him by the code name Curveball, this 20-something former government employee flew to Munich seeking a luxurious Western life. To bolster his appeal for asylum, he began spinning tales about a secret weapons program run by Saddam Hussein. Unfortunately, German intelligence officers believed him. Four years later, an artist’s rendering of a mobile biological weapons lab was the centerpiece of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s argument for deposing Saddam. The lab was the product of Curveball’s imagination.
Even though we know how this story ends, said Judith Miller in The Wall Street Journal, Drogin brings suspense to his detailed retelling. The CIA concluded far too late that none of Curveball’s stories was true. The salient drama came before the war, when “childish bickering” between dysfunctional U.S. intelligence agencies and prickly relations with their German counterparts caused initial misjudgments to metastasize. Drogin infuses “fascinating detail” into this story but lets his rhetoric get away from him. Though he claims some U.S. officials told outright lies about the Iraqi weapons intelligence, he doesn’t prove anyone’s mendacity. What’s more, the idea that Curveball “caused” the war only holds up if one believes that without his evidence, Saddam would not have been judged a threat.
Drogin doesn’t ever “scold or lecture,” though, said Lisa Medchill in The New York Observer. “He does what a good reporter must,” focusing on his narrative and turning what could have been a dry autopsy into “a gripping spy story.” Better still, said Spencer Ackerman in The Washington Monthly, Drogin’s account illustrates why “it’s only a matter of time before another Curveball poisons the intelligence well.” Assigning blame for failures in 2002 and 2003 is not reason enough to revisit this story. The timely and valuable accomplishment of Curveball is that it shows precisely how the intelligence agencies we have today bring out “the worst impulses of intelligence professionals.”
Novel of the week
The Abstinence Teacher
by Tom Perrotta
(St. Martin’s, $24.95)
Tom Perrotta is often mistaken for a satirist, said James Parker in the Boston Phoenix. Instead of belittling his flawed suburban characters, though, Perrotta befriends each and every one of them “as they bumble disgracefully and humanly along.” Though the popular author of Little Children and Election pokes into life in the cul-de-sacs of Northeastern suburbia with an arched brow and a particular pitilessness, he’s too generous to write satire. His latest novel, for instance, lifts off when a small town’s growing evangelical community takes exception to a sex-ed teacher’s cautious classroom admission that oral sex can be pleasurable. When romantic sparks start flying between the embattled teacher and her daughter’s Jesus-loving soccer coach, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, a conventional opposites-attract comedy seems in store.
Though “moments of genuine hilarity” do pop up, Perrotta’s grown-ups “are preoccupied by grown-up problems.” Whether secular liberals or Bible literalists, they endure “sour marriages and unfulfilling jobs,” and their struggles add up to a “sad-funny-touching story” about middle age and the perils of letting any ideology dominate your thinking.
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-ups