Those of you who have been reading for along time may recall that I love to pull apart the short Schulz biographies that are written as part of bulk biography sets for school libraries. They often make up for their short, shallow nature by adding factual inaccuracies or laughably bad pictures. Well, someone has launched a similar bulk set of biographies for the Kindle, and has done things that put them all to shame in the shamefulness department:

That’s right: Charles Schultz: A Short Biography for Kids misspells Schulz’s name in the title, right on the cover! You cannot beat that for inattention to detail.

What about the text inside this book by Sylvia Miner? Well, it’s mostly accurate. It misses in spots (“Snoopy is always trying to write the great American novel, but he cannot get beyond the first line of his book – ‘It was a dark and stormy night.'” Oh really? So all that stuff about the door slamming, the maid screaming, the pirate ship appearing on the horizon — he never gets to that?), and as a biography, it skips a lot (no mention that Schulz had kids of his own, the fact that he got rejected for marriage by his little red-haired girl is mentioned but the fact that he had a wife only shows up in the final two sentences, and there is not even an allusion to his first wife), more interested in its few pages in Peanuts rather than Schulz. But that’s not what’s really bad about the text that Sylvia Miner wrote…

It’s plagiarized.

If you want to read the text of this (and except for the cover image, the text is all there is), you can read the whole thing here. It’s the text of a 2005 Voice of America broadcast written by Jerilyn Watson. Voice of America is the US government’s broadcasting outreach to the world, and this was a “special English” broadcast, meant to help foreigner English learners with their comprehension. The ebook does have some slight editing, combining shorter sentences into longer ones, replacing numbers that were spelled out (“twenty six hundred”) to ones written numerically (“2,600”), and some slight wording changes. But it even recreates the typos in the transcript (the one use of the spelling “Shultz” – the story never uses the misspelling seen on Miner’s cover – and the misplaced apostrophe in “L’il Folks”). Miner might reasonably claim some editorial credit – but author credit? Reuse of Watson’s material may not be against the law (I’m unsure of the structure of Voice of America, but material created by US government employees within the scope of their employment is automatically public domain), but credit belongs where credit is due.

If you want this biography, you can read it at the link above or listen to the broadcast here. (It’s not likely to tell you anything new about Schulz – it’s not made for the AAUGH Blog reader.) Don’t buy the ebook.

Added note: usually when I link to a book on Amazon, the cover image is coming to you directly from Amazon. In this case, I’ve stored a copy of the cover image locally, for the record, in case they correct the cover later.

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