Unauthorized Portraits

From one of America’s most brilliant satirical artists: his best, his funniest, his most deliciously wicked and memorable caricatures of the past thirty years.

Here are history’s great and near great–166 heroes, rogues, fools, and geniuses: from Moses leading his kvetching people (“Some miracle! If I don’t get pneumonia, that’ll be a miracle”) through the parted Red Sea waters, to George Gershwin teaching Fred Astaire a dance step, to Madonna seen as a horseperson of the apocalypse; from Brahms dozing off as Liszt plays, to Rodin auditioning models, and Reagan as Robin Hood, taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

Here are such fabulous targets for the satirist’s pen as LBJ, Nixon and the Watergate Gang, a holstered Jimmy Carter at high noon in the hostage crisis, and a poignant Dan Quayle as the central figure in a comic strip about a man who wants a little respect.

And it’s pure pleasure to watch Sorel portray Tom Wolfe in his famous white suit or Woody Allen and Mia Farrow caught in The Storm, or draw a bead on such superstars as Picasso and John Updike, Barbra Streisand, Colette, Truman Capote, and the entire cast of Casablanca. Each of the book’s three sections–“History,” “Entertainment and the Arts,” “Politics” –has a wry autobiographical introduction, and every drawing has its own pithy, informative caption.

Here’s wit aplenty, visual and verbal–a splendid satirical view of the wise, the beautiful, the clever, and the flawed, over the centuries, who loom large in our lives and in our imaginations.

“From the Hardcover edition.