How to Spend Your Gift Certificate: Part 1

Ignore the lame Walter Kirn review in last weekend's NYTBR and go ahead, splurge on The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker. The weakness of the review isn't entirely Kirn's fault. Sure, he bears responsibility for the trying-to-be-clever premise that the magazine's cartoons created "a cynical, ironic, smirking bunch of spiritual weaklings headed up by Al Franken and Michael Moore," but any reviewer facing the dancing-about-architecture prospect of having to describe cartoons strictly in prose would resort to such desperate gimmicks. I'm almost sure of it.

So I'm not even going to try to tell you how great this book is. I'm just going to steer you towards The Cartoon Bank and let you probe the tip of the iceberg for yourself.