Reviewing the Mail: Week of August 15, 2026

I was out at the library, and vaguely unhappy with the choices I had at home for my next book to read. (Three big bookcases just isn't enough choice, I guess.) So I was poking around the new arrivals shelves there, and came away with one book:

Joshua Kendall's Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography is just what it says it is, a biography of Doonesbury creator G.B. Trudeau. It came out a couple of months ago from Abrams, and is heavily illustrated, which is a big plus for a biography of a cartoonist: Kendall can describe a strip, and then show it. I'm about halfway through right now, and it's pleasant, though I'm realizing Trudeau had a boring life - a major hazard for the lives of creative types, who mostly live in their own heads. So far, Kendall is impressively well-informed, with lots of interviews of all sorts of people (including the publicity-shy Trudeau himself), so I might just be complaining about Trudeau's actual life, not the book about it.