"On a beautiful day like this it would be best to stay in bed so you wouldn't get up and spoil it," says Charlie Brown in Charles M. Schulz' latest triumph, You're Something Else, Charlie Brown. To review it is like getting out of bed—too risky to be undertaken seriously; safe only for the light-hearted. And if you're lighthearted you may read it and chuckle or smile, but chuckles and smiles have never made it in English orthography, even with the license accorded comic-strip artists. So let us merely say hurrah and pass on swiftly to some earnest thoughts about the Charlie Brown phenomenon in general, and another and far less successful Charlie Brown book in particular [You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown].

The celebrated Pooh perplex perploxed the Depression generation of privileged children and parents—those, that is, who could afford two bucks for a book...