Doesn’t provide as much depth as more conventional biographies, but Jaffee’s voice and life will hook the reader.
As journalist Weisman (My Baby Boomer Baby Book: A Record of Milestones, Millstones & Gallstones, 2006, etc.) demonstrates, the life story of veteran MAD cartoonist is stranger than anything he has ever drawn for the magazine.
Though Al Jaffee (b. 1921) has been associated with MAD longer than anyone in the magazine’s history, few familiar with his work know the stories that underlie his barbed sense of humor. “A résumé of Al’s formative years,” writes the author, “reads like a comic strip of traumatic cliff-hangers, with cartoons by Jaffee and captions by Freud.” Or maybe by Kafka, for this account—of how the six-year-old boy was taken back to Lithuania by his immigrant mother, and then shuttled back and forth between a European homeland still steeped in the 19th century and an America where he ultimately felt like an outsider—is a whiplash series of transitions for the reader, let alone for the young boy who had to navigate them. Jaffee’s own voice dominates—even more than it might in an “as told to” autobiography—and the culture shock he details, down to the stench of the outhouse, amid a surge of anti-Semitism and the advent of Hitler, goes a long way toward explaining the distrust he has held for the world of adults and the revenge his defiantly adolescent humor takes upon them. With a few dozen illustrations by the 89-year-old cartoonist, who remains best known for the MAD “fold-ins” he has drawn for decades, the biography initially reads like an extended, single-source interview profile—it had its genesis as a magazine feature—yet belatedly broadens to include other perspectives once it progresses to his improbable career at the magazine.
Doesn’t provide as much depth as more conventional biographies, but Jaffee’s voice and life will hook the reader.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-186448-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
