Lucille

Readers and critics were wowed by G. B. Trudeau's epic masterpiece 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective, and they'll rejoice when they see this beautiful follow-up volume. Featuring an innovative format and an all-new collection of strips, Red Rascal's War is the first all-color Doonesbury book ever.

Both Trudeau and his fans have followed Doonesbury's ever-expanding cast through four decades of cultural turbulence and change. With its arresting cover and rich interior, Red Rascal's War showcases the most recent additions to a body of work the New York Times admiringly refers to as a sprawling masterwork.

[Trudeau is] Dickensian in his range of characters, writes Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books. Trudeau has just kept improving, year after year, in part because he stays so close to changing events. . . . He has never been better than in the last six years.

From the exploits of Afghan legend-in-chief Sorkh Razil to the pipe dreams of Malibu's top nanny Zonker Harris, and from the no more chill pills intervention by Obama's aides to the way-cool love of a headbanging war vet and his MIT-grad gal, Doonesbury marches wildly on.

What else is guaranteed to make you think, feel nostalgic, and laugh out loud at least once a page? --Karen Holt, O Magazine

First, there was The Gilgamesh.

Then... the Bhagavad-Gita

Then... the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran

Then... the Book of Mormon, Dianetics, I'm OK You're OK.

The ultimate how-to of management. Based on years of management practice and actually watching what good managers do, it cuts through the noise of management theory, to show you how to develop the skills, behaviour and emotions to thrive as a manager.

In How to Manage youll learn how to:

• Evaluate your own management potential

• Assess team members and help them discover how they can improve

• Identify and build the core skills you need to succeed

• Recognise the rules of survival and success in your organisation

Jaffees inventive work has enlivened the pages of MAD since 1955. To date he has pickled three generations of American kids in the brine of satire, and continues to bring millions of childhoods to untimely ends with the knowledge that parents are hypocrites, teachers are dummies, politicians are liars, and life isnt fair.

Jaffees work for MAD has made him a cultural icon, but the compelling and at times bizarre story of his life has yet to be told. A synopsis of Jaffees formative years alone reads like a comic strip of traumatic cliff-hangers with cartoons by Jaffee and captions by Freud. Six-year-old Jaffee was separated from his father, uprooted from his home in Savannah, Georgia, and transplanted by his mother to a shtetl in Lithuania, a nineteenth-century world of kerosene lamps, outhouses, physical abuse, and near starvation. He would be rescued by his father, returned to America, taken yet again by his mother back to the shtetl, and once again rescued by his father, even as Hitler was on the march.

When he finally settled back in America as a twelve-year-old wearing cobbled shoes and speaking his native English with a Yiddish accent, schoolmates called him greenhorn. He struggled with challenges at least as great as those he had met in Europe. His luck changed, however, when he was chosen to be a member of the first class to attend New York Citys High School of Music and Art. There his artistic ability saved him.

He would go on to forge relationships with Stan Lee, Harvey Kurtzman, and Will Elder, launching a career that would bring him to MAD magazine. There he found himself at the forefront of a movement that would change the face of humor and cartooning in America.

A cliff-hanger of a life deserves a page-turner of a biography, and that is what Mary-Lou Weisman and Al Jaffee have delivered.