AAUGH Blog reader Asher asked me about the reference in the Tablet article that I linked to yesterday to Rabbi Twerski having written a fifth Peanuts-illustrated book, What’s the Big Deal?, which was issued translated into Japanese but never in its native English. He was wanting more information on it, and having looked into this in the past (and just tried looking into it again), I can tell you that the reasons I didn’t list it in my prior post is that I’m not sure that it exists. I can find a couple of mentions of it in coverage of Twerski, but I cannot find the book itself.
Now you’re thinking “maybe, unlike books that were published in the US first, they didn’t include the English title on the release,” and that would be quite possibly true…. but I’ve gone through sources (mainly Amazon’s Japanese branch) looking at Twerski’s Japanese book covers, and I cannot find a single one that includes Peanuts but isn’t identifiable as one of the four books that were released in the US.
So maybe there is a book, and finding it is beyond my competency (many things are.) Or maybe it was something book-like — a magazine article, perhaps. Or perhaps it was just a project that never saw release. (I do find it interesting though that you can find Twerski writing about the popularity of his Peanuts-related work in Japan – admittedly, a few years before the Tablet piece – without mentioning that fifth book.)
So while I don’t feel anywhere near confident enough to definitely say that there wasn’t a fifth book, I’m also not confident that there was.
And that’s the news from the wishy-washy AAUGH Blogger!
