When your computer powers down, the little "dot" is off-duty. You don't think it just sits there, do you? Read full book review >

The quirky follow-up to the author/illustrator duo's PscyhoGeography (2007). Read full book review >

Anglophones and -philes who have wondered about the origins of the Peek Freans Company's Bourbon and Garibaldi Biscuits will be entertained by Steadman's fanciful version of history and enlightened by the (somewhat) straighter dope in his afterword. No sooner, it seems, does the great Garibaldi return to his Italian hometown after many adventures than his grandmother is snatched by hungry French soldiers ("Bourbons") to cook for them. Rousing his red-shirted army—all of whom are armed with water balloons and use pizzas as belt buckles for quick battlefield snacks—Garibaldi charges to the rescue. Undaunted, his grandma takes pity on the vanquished invaders and whips up batches of chocolate and non-chocolate "biscuits" for both sides. The illustrations have a dashed-off, late-Steig-ish look, with awkwardly posed figures placed into scenes depicted with splashes of color and quick, jumbled pen strokes. Though the overall effect is quirky and comical, the snacks and historical references will mean more to young readers on the other side of the pond. Likely a miss on this side, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. (Picture book. 6-8) Read full book review >

Self (The Book of Dave, 2006, etc.) walks, and as he walks, he spins the shambling, freely associative web of a drunken spider. Read full book review >

The original art director of all things gonzo, Steadman recalls 30 years of mythic adventures with the Master. Read full book review >

Dahl (The Umbrella Man and Other Stories, 1998, etc.) weaves the story of the treasure and greed that unearthed the richest collection of Roman silver plate ever found in British soil. When Dahl was a young writer selling stories to magazines, he read a newspaper article about a find of Roman silver in a small town. The story so interested him that he traveled to the town and interviewed the ploughman who found it. This is a slightly edited republication of that story with new illustrations. On a cold, windy winter's day, George Butcher, hired to plow a field, struck a hard object that turned out to be one of 36 encrusted pieces of Roman silver. Ignorant of their worth, Butcher allowed Ford, an amateur archaeologist, to keep them. Knowing that he should report the treasure to the government and that a reward for the find should go to Butcher, Ford polished and hid everything. Four years later, a visiting archaeologist noticed two silver spoons on the mantle and the story came out. Claiming that he thought the artifacts were pewter, not silver, which under British law belongs to the government, Ford relinquished the pieces. The government awarded both men 1,000 pounds. If Ford had told Butcher about the treasure's worth immediately, Butcher's reward would have been at least a half-million pounds, and Ford would have received nothing. Steadman's dark, often grotesque and mysterious figures create a moody accompaniment to this strange tale with an ironic ending. A fascinating story. (Nonfiction. 12+ )Read full book review >

For the oenophile with a sense of humor: In The Grapes Of Ralph ($35.00; Oct. 1996; 224 pages; ISBN 0-15-100245-2) the wicked cartoonist and illustrator offers a tour of the wine countries of the world and their leading denizens. Accompanying the narrative is Steadman's warped, witty art: Top-hatted Frenchmen inserting their sniffers into wineglasses; German grapes exploding in a heatwave—a perfect subject for Steadman's blotchy inkblot style; and in Australia, a portrait of of a woman known as Long Flat Red, who dyed her wardrobe in her husband's vintage of 1894. Effervescent and not too dry. Read full book review >

Fear and Loathing on the Kona coast of Hawaii: Thompson trots out his familiar act as Yahoo-anarchist-poète maudit—but despite a few inspired fits of zaniness, and some appropriately phantasmagoric drawings by Ralph Steadman, it just doesn't work. The Thompson-Steadman vision of Las Vegas made powerful symbolic sense because its neo-Boschian monstrosities seemed like a fun-house mirror of late 1960s America. Here too we get the (literally) incredible boozing and drugs, the violent antics of the journalist (assigned to cover the Honolulu Marathon) gone haywire, the sardonic put-on of outpigging the pigs. This time Thompson fancies himself the reincarnation of the Hawaiian god Lono, a brutal deity in charge of "the season of abundance and relaxation," who sailed away on a three-cornered raft promising to return. In 1779 when Captain Cook dropped anchor in Kealakekua Bay, the eager natives took him for Lono—though not for long. Thompson continually toys with the figure of Cook (as an archetypal arrogant imperialist, quite properly hacked to pieces) and interlards his ravings with many quotations from Richard Hough's The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook—a far more interesting text. Finally, after ignoring the Marathon ("Why do those buggers run? Why do they punish themselves. . . for no prize at all?") and enduring three weeks of furious tropical storms and sodden misery, Thompson saves his strange vacation by landing a 308 lb. marlin hours before flying back to Colorado. The one photo in the book shows Thompson (barely distinguishable from any other lei-garlanded tourist) grasping the dorsal fin of his catch in cool, self-mocking triumph: Lono has arrived. But he hasn't—just an occasionally amusing Haole and generally insufferable wise-ass. Read full book review >