What is it?
Herz, Peggy. TV Close-Ups. New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1975.
Why should M*A*S*H fans care?
In the 1970s, Scholastic released a series of children’s books for fans of popular television shows, and M*A*S*H was often featured. Each book had a series of articles (taken from the classroom magazines) highlighting different actors. In this volume from 1975, the actors featured is Gary Burghoff from M*A*S*H.
As a M*A*S*H fan, what part(s) should I read?
The chapter on Gary Burghoff is only eight pages, but it is the first chapter in the book! As always, I recommend reading the whole book, but each chapter does stand alone.
TL;DR Review
Scholastic’s classroom magazines were popular in the 1970s, and they often featured articles on popular culture. Author Peggy Herz wrote several books that were collections of actor biographies from popular television shows. Several of those books featured an actor from M*A*S*H, and in this book, Herz highlights the early career of Gary Burghoff and how he became Radar in both the movie and the series.
Full Review
As I continue highlighting Scholastic’s children’s books that featured M*A*S*H in the 1970s (All About M*A*S*H, TV’s Top Ten: Shows and Their Stars, and TV Time ’74), this week we look Peggy Herz’s TV Close-Ups from 1975. This book was published early in M*A*S*H‘s run, and features twelve biographies of actors from popular television shows. For M*A*S*H, Herz features Gary Burghoff and she dives into his childhood and early career on the stage and the big screen. Burghoff played Radar in the Robert Altman movie M*A*S*H, so he knew the character when the series began. Herz’s books are written for a middle school and high school audience, but they are written in the style of a reporter because many of these articles were featured in Scholastic’s classroom magazines.
Herz’s 1975 edition of her series of television books features chapters about popular actors from the mid-1970s including Michael Landon, Freddie Prinze, Kurt Russell, Valerie Harper, Ron Howard, Richard Thomas, and more. These actors represented the most popular shows on television in the mid-1970s, and, in this book M*A*S*H is the first show featured. In the 1974 edition of the book, she featured Alan Alda, but in 1975, she featured another popular M*A*S*H actor, Gary Burghoff. In a well written chapter with several quotes from Burghoff, Herz discusses Burghoff’s upbringing, his time on the stage, and how he came to be on M*A*S*H. One of the major topics was Burghoff’s appearance as Charlie Brown in the Broadway production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. This play is what earned Burghoff the recognition of Gene Reynolds and led to his casting as Radar in the both the M*A*S*H movie and television series.
The eight page chapter about Burghoff is brief, but it is well written. Herz writes well and includes several quotes from Burghoff about not only M*A*S*H, but his childhood and his time on Broadway. When this book was published in early 1975, Burghoff was in his third season on M*A*S*H, and he would star in the show for five more years. We know that he would later leave the series, and he went into many of the topics covered in this book in more detail in his own memoir, Gary Burghoff: To M*A*S*H and Back: My Life in Poems and Songs (That Nobody ever Wanted to Publish). As I have mentioned in the last several of these Scholastic book reviews, I worked for the company for eleven years. And one thing Scholastic is great at is publishing a variety of books to meet the interests of just about every child. Reading is an important skill, and one that only improves with practice. Books like TV Close-Ups encouraged kids to pick up a book and read, and that is a great way to build a child’s literacy skills.
The M*A*S*H Historian 