Peanuts and American Culture

Coming next May is the book Peanuts and American Culture,.Looking at Peanuts  in the context of it’s “Cold War roots, this collection of new essays explores existentialism, the reshaping of the nuclear family, the Civil Rights Movement, 1960s counterculture, feminism, psychiatry and fear of the bomb. Chapters focus on the development of Lucy, Peppermint Patty, Schroeder, Franklin, Shermy, Snoopy and the other characters that became American icons.” This comes from McFarland & Company, so not a university press like some of the books we’ve seen of late, but rather a company that does a broad array of books analyzing pop culture. The editor, listed variously as Peter Y. W. Lee and Peter W. Lee, appears to have previously headed up similar books about Star Trek and Star Wars.

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New releases
Peanuts books all a-board!

The mail brought two new Peanuts board books this week, and the web offered up images of another, so I guess that’s the theme for the day. Cheering You On, Charlie Brown looks first at how Charlie Brown has a lot of difficulty in life, but then at how he …

Upcoming releases
Great Pumpkin Carols are coming

I have noted before that there seems to be a fair bit of lasting affection out there for The Peanuts Book of Pumpkin Carols, a booklet of Halloween-related lyrics for famed tunes that Hallmark put out in the 1960s and redesigned and reissued a few times. It’s clear that Chronicle Books …

Upcoming releases
Charles Schulz – The Comic Book

It wasn’t that long ago that we had no comics-format biographies of Charles M. Schulz. Now we have the manga biography and the series-of-strips biography (ooh, steeply discounted at the moment)… and coming December, we have just a basic comic book biography. Tribute: Charles M. Schulz is from Tidal Wave, …