A Mickey Mouse Reader

A Mickey Mouse Reader Garry Apgar, Editor. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014.When Garry Apgar set out to write Mickey Mouse: Emblem of the American Spirit, soon to be published by the Walt Disney Family Foundation, he found a plethora of sources on the famous mouse. As he arranged his mass of raw material, he realized its value for scholars, leading to A Mickey Mouse Reader. Apgar describes his book as "a compendium of the liveliest, most instructive, and influential texts on Mickey Mouse from 1928 to the present day. It contains not just the musings of scholars or the literati, but also less solemn fare, geared toward what the French call le grand public" (xx). The sixty-nine articles derive from diverse publications, such as the New York Times (Mickey's "newspaper of record" from which Apgar takes one sixth of the book's text), The New Yorker, Time, Literary Digest, Washington Post, Harvard Crimson, Journal of Popular Culture, and Art Digest, and represent some of the most insightful authors ever to write about Disney's famous mouse, including Diego Rivera, Terry Rams aye, E.M. Forster, Maurice Sendak, John Culhane, Stephen Jay Gould, John Updike, Marshall Fishwick, John Cane maker, Charles Solomon, M. Thomas Inge, Garry Apgar, and Walt Disney himself (or his publicist, who offers "What Mickey Means to Me"). This book of essays, although not designed to be read in one sitting from cover to cover, could be, for it provides a compelling narrative of the interwoven careers of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse over nearly a half century, during which the film industry traversed from, as Apgar notes, "the heyday of silent pictures and the advent of talkies into the Golden Age of the studio system, and its decline" (xvii).The book is arranged chronologically in seven sections, each with an introduction highlighting Mickey Mouse's tie to the culture of the time. Apgar's annotations for virtually every entry assist the reader in charting Mickey Mouse through several stages of media technology and social change and in understanding the development of his myth. For example, Apgar notes the first mentions of Disney's wife Lillian's and, much later, coworker Ub Iwerks' contributions to the Mickey Mouse creation story. He also follows the ebbs and flows of Mickey Mouse's stature in the public perception. In Mickey's early years, writers frequently compared him to Chaplin. In 1931, Time acknowledged Mickey's international prominence, saying, "Like Charlie Chaplin, Mickey Mouse is understood all over the world because he does not talk" (23). The same year, in American Magazine, Harry Carr called him "one of the greatest 'box office' actors in the world-though he is the only one who doesn't receive a salary" (25). By 1933, the College Art Association reported on a tour of Mickey Mouse art that ran in prestigious art houses such as New York City's Kennedy Galleries and Boston's Robert C. …