This book is a collection of political cartoons from the New Yorker spanning eighty years. It is a nice hard cover book with the cartoons reproduced large enough that you can see a the little details. The book opens with an introduction by Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote "The Tipping Point" and the cartoons are divided up by decade.

I wasn't expecting these cartoons to be ha-ha funny - like political cartoons, I imagine that economic cartoons are intended more to make a point or show a different perspective or connection than to produce a laugh out loud response. And while the cartoons themselves are nice to look at and flip through as a coffee table book, I definitely felt the book lacked something - context. I have a history degree and teach history, so I have a decent grasp of twentieth century U.S. history, but that was not enough to help me understand the specific context of a lot of the cartoons. Sure, I grasped that the cartoons from the 30s would reflect the great depression, but many of the names or events were not ones with which I was familiar, so that decreased the enjoyment I would have had. At the beginning of the book Malcolm Gladwell picks a couple of cartoons to put in economic and historical context, and it does wonders for how much I could appreciate what I was seeing. I wish they'd provided some abbreviated version of this for more of the cartoons or at the beginning of each new decade represented. ( )

On the Money: The Economy in Cartoons is a coffee-table collection of more than 400 cartoons drawn from the pages of The New Yorker magazine from 1925 to 2009.

The book is sturdily produced and the cartoons -- involving money, taxes, spending, investing, business operations and class-status -- are clever, insightful and ironic. Because they’re organized by decade, I enjoyed tracking trends in content (living large in the ‘20s; economizing in the ‘30s; patriotism and inflation in the ‘40s; the emergence of the IRS and specific companies and a more prominent role of personal finance in later decades; the cycles of growth and recession throughout) and trends in the art itself (visually dark images early on; lighter, sparer drawings of late).

And what locks this book into the 5-star category is Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent Introduction -- a theory of humor that acknowledges the differing rules of business life (realism) and personal life (romanticism) and suggests that “funny” happens when the rules are misapplied. (For more about the process of creativity and cartooning, take a look at Robert Mankoff’s The Naked Cartoonist.)

For terrific social commentary -- as opposed to laugh-out-loud humor -- I highly recommend this collection. ( )