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Since Friday is kind of an unusual release day for a book, i checked the bookstores yesterday figuring the 26th date was kind of a conservative date given how Christmas might mess up mail/deliveries - and sure enough i found it in the second bookstore i looked in.
To answer a previous question, no, it is not like Sesame Unpaved - there's a book coming out later this next year which will be more like a 40th anniversary edition of Unpaved - more the coffee table style book loaded with both text, trivia, and pictures. Street Gang is an in-depth history woven together much like a historic novelization...there's some insert pages in the middle with some rare b&w photos, but it's not mostly a major telling of Sesame's history, development, backstage struggles and challenges, etc.
Shy of 400 pages, this will take some time to go through but i love what i've read so far...i can honestly say this is the book a lot of us have been waiting for...while there is focus on a lot of major players and parts of the Sesame team not necessairily connected with the Muppets, there's also a level of in-depth stories, facts, and descriptions of what they're really like that is culled from over 200 interviews and lots of other keys-to-the-kingdom sources - you will read stuff in here that you probably would never find in an authorized Henson biography. The prologue focuses on Henson's memorial (and for those who have seen the tape of it in its entirety, you'll learn the rather surprising reason why Daryl Hannah had been in such a prime spot among Henson's closest associated) and a lot of stuff that was going through Joan Ganz Cooney's and others' minds as to how the loss of Henson as a firm advocate of not including the Sesame characters as part of the sale to Disney was going to make things very tough for them soon afterwards...we've heard some of the horror stories...there's those and more really shocking stuff there. So far i've read the prologue, did a little bit of skimming through to get a feel for the goodies i'm in for, read most of chapters 1-4, chapter 5 (Jim bio), chapter 7 (Spinney bio) and you'll learn a lot more about Spinney that what we got "Wisdom of Big Bird" about his early years, career, and influences. And this is all really just the beginning. The book doesn't shy away from what some might consider "dirt" but it's not there for tabloid type shock value but just part of the real unsanitized story of how things are and have been.
I really don't want to give away a lot of surprises just yet...but trust me, there will be many!
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