Al Jaffee's Mad Life

The iconic and inventive cartoonist Al Jaffee has been delighting MAD magazine readers since 1955. Weisman, a onetime neighbor of Jaffee, heard most of his story over the years and convinced him to let her set it all down. Allen Rickman's engaging and comfortable tone works well in depicting Jaffee's life, particularly the accounts of his neglected childhood, which included twice being inexplicably uprooted by his mother from their home in Georgia and brought to Lithuanian shtetls just before WWII. It's unfortunate that the listener is unable to appreciate the sampling of Jaffee's cartoons that illustrate the print version of this book. Inexplicably, the audiobook ends with a dead stop that provides no sense of closure. W.A.G. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine