A Boy Named Shel

This one is for Golfwidow.   I’ve long been a big fan of Shel Silverstein, particularly of his extremely popular children’s book Where The Sidewalk Ends.   I was also aware that he was an accomplished recording artist, having heard him sing "I Got Stoned And I Missed It" on his album "Freaking At The Freakers Ball".   But I honestly didn’t know much at all about the man himself.   Lisa Rogak has fixed that.

A Boy Named Shel–The Life And times of Shel Silverstein is a well-written and fairly standard biography by Lisa Rogak, who is the author of more than forty books, including The Unauthorized Biography of Dan Brown (Brown being the author of The DaVinci Code).  Rogak seems to be the sort of skilled and workman-like writer who makes a comfortable living churning out books that sell without ever becoming well known herself.   And she has certainly done a more than competent job of telling the story of Silverstein.

I was fascinated by the stories of Silverstein’s difficult childhood in Chicago where from a very, very young age he was constantly drawing cartoons and of his early career as a globe-trotting travelogue cartoonist for Playboy magazine which I had known nothing about.  It was very interesting me to learn that Silverstein was adamantly unwilling to do revisions.  Unlike some artists and writers who start with a very rough sketch or draft and refine,  refine, refine all of Silverstein’s published work was published exactly as he put it down on paper for a very first time.   If an editor requested revisions, he might be willing to start over again and submit something completely different but he never fiddled.   (And while I do always make typos and other mistakes that need to be corrected in proof-reading,  I find that I am my Uncle Shelby’s boy in that my first draft is most always my best one.)

If you have ever been a fan of Shel Silverstein’s books, recordings or magazine work,  I urge you to head to the library and check out A Boy Named Shel.   This one comes Highly Recommended.

A tip of my hat and sincerest thanks to The Turnip of Power,  a great blogger and very generous Entrecard community member who very kindly created a new logo icon for me.  ‘Aint it cool!