Paper cuts

Politics is a funny business. Here one of our best political cartoonists charts the vital signs of America's ailing body politic, from the waning days of Ronald Reagan to the noisy rise of Newt Gingrich. Dan Wasserman is a favorite of newspaper readers around the country for his droll, gimlet-eyed assessments of Washington's twists and turns, often expressed in his trademark four-panel drawings.

This collection of several hundred Wasserman cartoons covers eight years of national and international politics, three presidents, two national elections and the beginning of a third, and broken campaign promises too numerous to count.

It touches on the public fight over private morality, the state of the environment, the health-care crisis, and the creeping commercialism of everyday life - with stops along the way for Dan Quayle, gays in the military, the strange life of Ross Perot, and conservatives' obsessions with other people's bedrooms.

Dan Wasserman also talks about his self-conception as a salaried graffiti artist and graphic heckler, and tries to tie together some of the threads of his work without the use of polling data or paid political consultants.