Drawn & Quartered: The History of American Political Cartoons
It's hard to imagine a book on this topic that's better thanDrawn  and Quartered. Authors Stephen Hess and Sandy Northrop have created a  history that is lucid, authoritative, and fun. The profuse illustrations are, as one would expect, varied and entertaining. Even better, the cartoons featured do an excellent job of demonstrating the evolution of political cartooning from Ben Franklin (America's first editorial cartoonist) to the present.Hess and Northrop do an excellent job of relating cartoons to the political and social climate in which they were created. For example, "Caricatures of [Martin Luther] King, Malcolm X, and the other African American leaders who rose to prominence [in the 1950s and 1960s] are hard to find. Cartoonists and their newspapers grew so sensitive to the volatility of caricaturing black leaders, fearing that they would be perceived as racial slurs.... Instead, cartoonists employed generic situations and peopled them with generic black figures. Martin Luther King Jr. became an invisible man in the cartoons of the [era]."Readers casually interested in the topic will findDrawn and Quarteredan entertaining and unique book. Aficionados will be satisfied with the book's sagacity and depth, and may even discover illustrators that they did not know. All will agree that Hess and Northrop deserve a round of applause.--Michael Gerber