From School Library Journal
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Gr 2–5—With baseball season gearing up, Charlie Brown steps
up to manage his ragtag team of players. Schulz was perhaps one
of the greatest ambassadors of the game, and who better than his
iconic character to depict the fickle winds of fame and glory.
Three short stories comprise this collection of tales from the
field as Charlie tries to instill some discipline into the always
distracted Lucy, some hustle into the blanket-dependent Linus,
and some compliance from his comic foil, Snoopy. Despite best
efforts, the boy hits rock bottom after losing a game with 600 to
zero. Just as he hopes to rally his downtrodden players, his
mother makes him push Lucy in a stroller instead. How can he be
expected to manage his team? Good grief! The genius of Schulz is
the pathos of Charlie Brown. When he laments, "Life is just too
much for me," readers will understand. The author doesn't
patronize the difficulties of the young. This gift book is a
departure from the publisher's collective volumes of Schulz's
work, in an attempt to reach other audiences. The only problem
with this edition is that it contains no original copyright
dates. Comic aficionados will be frustrated with not having a
sense of where and when to place these strips in the overall
of the cartoonist's oeuvre. Save up for Fantagraphics's
complete volumes instead.—Meg Allison, The Moretown School, VT
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About the Author
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Charles M. Schulz was born November 25, 1922, in
Minneapolis. His destiny was foreshadowed when an uncle gave him,
at the age of two days, the nickname Sparky (after the racehorse
Spark Plug in the newspaper strip Barney Google).In his senior
year in high school, his mother noticed an ad in a local
newspaper for a correspondence school, Federal Schools (later
called Art Instruction Schools). Schulz passed the talent test,
completed the course, and began trying, unsuccessfully, to sell
gag cartoons to magazines. (His first published drawing was of
his dog, Spike, and appeared in a 1937 Ripley's Believe It or
Not! installment.) Between 1948 and 1950, he succeeded in selling
17 cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post―as well as, to the local
St. Paul Pioneer Press, a weekly comic feature called Li'l Folks.
It was run in the women's section and paid $10 a week. After
writing and drawing the feature for two years, Schulz asked for a
better location in the paper or for daily exposure, as well as a
raise. When he was turned down on all three counts, he quit.He
started submitting strips to the newspaper syndicates. In the
spring of 1950, he received a letter from the United Feature
Syndicate, announcing their interest in his submission, Li'l
Folks. Schulz boarded a train in June for New York City; more
interested in doing a strip than a panel, he also brought along
the first installments of what would become Peanuts―and that was
what sold. (The title, which Schulz loathed to his dying day, was
imposed by the syndicate.) The first Peanuts daily appeared
October 2, 1950; the first Sunday, January 6, 1952.Diagnosed with
cancer, Schulz retired from Peanuts at the end of 1999. He died
on February 13, 2000, the day before Valentine's Day―and the day
before his last strip was published―having completed 17,897 daily
and Sunday strips, each and every one fully written, drawn, and
lettered entirely by his own hand―an unmatched achievement in
comics.
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