Charlie Brown’s America

I’ve finally picked up n the clues that Blake Scott Ball has a book coming out from Oxford University Press next year, called Charlie Brown’s America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts. This is a version of Dr. Ball’s PhD dissertation, “Charlie Brown’s America: Peanuts and the Politics of Wishy-Washy, 1950–1980″. Ball gave half a dozen presentations on Peanuts at various conferences from 2013 to 2017, so this is clearly not a casual interest. It’s not yet available for preorder, but I look forward to seeing this one!

(In trying to scrape up what info I could on the book, I stumbled across this interesting invocation of Peanuts: “Charlie Brown Versus Snow White: The Effects of Descriptiveness on Young and Older Adults’ Retrieval of Proper Names”.)

Share
Tweet this thing
Follow the AAUGH Blog
Upcoming releases
A box of squares

This May, Fantagraphics is collecting the various small square Peanuts books they’ve published into a new box set, Peanuts All Year Round Mini Collection. This includes: A Valentine for Charlie Brown — Valentine’s Day and romance strips Batter-Up Charlie Brown! — baseball strips Waiting for the Great Pumpkin — Halloween …

Upcoming releases
Game Day returns

Back in 2020, Fantagraphics dropped Game Day, a boxed set of sports-themes Peanuts strip reprint paperbackss, as a Costco exclusive. Next June it’s coming back, this time in hardcover and available through the usual sources. Designed as a Father’s Day gift, it should be good for anyone who likes Peanuts …

Upcoming releases
An unauthorized? biography

In the past, I’ve talked about the Charles Schulz biographies that are produced as part of bulk lines of biographies for school libraries, very brief, photo-heavy things meant to give kids something to write book reports about. Well ABDO, a company that has produced just such a biography in the …