The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life.

• Author: Kurtz, Steve

Steven Watts, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 453 pages, $30.00

Early on in my junior high years, during lunch period, a friend brought up how much he'd enjoyed the latest Disney movie - I think it was The World's Greatest Athlete The rest of us paused and looked at each other. We weren't sure if it was cool to like Disney any more - or to admit to it, anyway. Yeah, we'd loved the animated films, watched Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color on Sundays, and begged our parents to go to Disneyland when we were kids. But weren't we too old for this?

No one thought of Paramount or Universal productions this way, but Disney had carved out a niche. The name meant something: loved by kids, trusted by parents, and embarrassing to teenagers. How exactly did Disney go from an unknown name to a studio to a conglomerate to something approaching a way of life, both celebrated and derided?

Steven Watts's The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life tries to explain this transformation. Walt Disney's life was a fascinating journey - would that the book were equally fascinating. Unfortunately, Watts, a professor of history at the University of Missouri, has chosen a poor format. He'll sum up in a few pages the progress Disney made over, say, a decade and then spend the next few chapters going over and over the ramifications. In discussing Disney's numerous projects, he'll dutifully, ploddingly report what the critics said, both for and against, only occasionally enlivening the proceedings with his own point of view.

Nonetheless, an extraordinary story can be pieced together from Watts's stopand-go narrative. Walt Disney was born in Chicago on December 5, 1901. From 1905 to 1910, he was raised on a farm in Marceline, Missouri. While Walt spent his adult life in big cities, he would still rhapsodize over his "little home town, Marceline." His father, Elias, was a strict, religious, sometimes violent man with socialist leanings. (He believed in tough love - he wouldn't even fertilize the crops, feelings his vegetables would weaken if they had it too easy.) Walt's success was an odd combination, both affirming the traditional values of his childhood and rebelling against the discipline and austerity of his Midwestern upbringing.

Young Walt had a talent for drawing, earning money doing illustrations for newspapers and advertisements. Leaving home in 1919, he found work at a commercial art studio in Kansas City. After being laid off, he started his own shop in 1920 with a new friend and lifelong colleague, Ub Iwerks. It went under in a month. Always hustling, Walt soon found a job at the Kansas City Film Ad Co., his first direct employment in animation. Fascinated by the process, he created humorous cartoons in his spare time and, in May 1922, struck out on his own again, starting Laugh-O-Gram Films. This time the venture lasted more than a year before going bankrupt. In July 1923, Walt left Kansas City for Hollywood.

Disney was a talented animator but an even better salesman, great at smooth-talking people into investing in his future. With implacable resolve, he built up his Los Angeles studio. Not once, but twice...