Who Cares, Charlie Brown?
- By : Nat
- Category : New releases, Reviews
I received no Peanuts books in the mail yesterday. Zero, nada, none. But I should start catching up on the books I received on the previous three days. The box of three books yesterday were all three initial books in the new Little Patriot Press line of Peanuts storybooks. These are the books that were coming out from Regnery Publishing, the self-styled conservative publishing house, and I was curious to see how heavy the politics would be in these books.
The three titles each have a story in which five historical figures are invoked – sometimes in passing mention, sometimes in some depth, sometimes just a glancing mention… but then after the story, there is a page of text apiece on these folks. For example, Who Cares Charlie Brown? has a story in which five heroic figure are mentioned in the midst of a tale of the kids struggling at baseball. Taking a sip from a drinking fountain leads Franklin to talking to Sally about Martin Luther King Jr.; American Red Cross founder Clara Barton gets a passing mention when Charlie Brown gets injured; Marcie, when taking photographs, makes a passing mention of photographer Lewis Hine; a passing sexist remark from Schroeder gets responded to with a mention of suffragette Susan B. Anthony. The back of the book has pieces on these four plus Rosa Parks.
The art on all of these is by Tom Brannon, using the same highly-rendered style he’s used on adaptations of the animation specials in the past. It’s all quite smoothly done.
As for worries that the books might reflect the aggressive political leanings of the rest of the Regnery line (their successful books are largely sold on their anti-Obamaness), that is quickly washed away. About the closest they come to figures that would be controversial among the left are Henry Ford and Christopher Colombus, and with the latter, they cover at least part of the concerns with the somewhat awkward sentence He wasn’t the first person to “discover” the Americas (after all, native people already lived there) but he did discover a New World and changed the course of human history. Nothing you wouldn’t see in a middle-of-the-road American history textbook. Anyone hoping that these books would be a right-wing effort to help revive the reputation of Joe McCarthy or sing the praises of Ayn Rand will be disappointed.
These aren’t vastly amusing, which is unsurprising considering their educational goals (think This is America, Charlie Brown rather than It’s the Great Pumpkin) and that Peanuts humor is hard to sustain in a text-oriented format. But they aren’t painful to read, and the art is often quite nice.
The books are about 9″x11.25″, 40 pages, with printed boards and dust jackets, reading levels “K” and “L” (which are apparently targets 7-8 year olds.) List for $16.99 apiece, and of course you get Amazon’s discounts when you order here:
