Al Jaffee's Mad Life: A Biography Book

Since 1955, when his work began enlivening the pages of MAD magazine, Al Jaffee has pickled three generations of American kids in the brine of satire—and he continues to bring millions of childhoods to untimely ends with the knowledge that parents are hypocrites, teachers are dummies, politicians are liars, and life isn't fair. Jaffee has a life story that is truly bizarre, that reads like a comic strip of traumatic cliff-hangers with cartoons by Jaffee and captions by Freud—from his traumatic childhood as a reverse immigrant to finding his adult place at the forefront of a movement that would forever change the face of humor and cartooning in America.

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