photo by Nell Mednick
Mary-Lou Weisman’s most recent book is Al Jaffee’s Mad Life, (Harper Collins, 2010). She is a prize winning journalist and best-selling author. She began her writing career as a freelance writer and columnist, most notably for The Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic and The New York Times.
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Adam Gopnik on His Book, The Table Comes First: France, Family, and the Meaning of Food
Adam Gopnik, the 2009 BOOKED for the evening honoree, was interviewed by Mary-Lou Weisman, author and Francophile, on his newest book, The Table Comes First: France, Family, and the Meaning of Food, which indulges gourmands everywhere, on Sunday, March 4, 2012.
Latest Work
Al Jaffee’s Mad Life
Now available in paperback!
Al Jaffee’s Mad Life (HarperCollins) is a biography of Al Jaffee, whose mad life began long before he became a celebrated writer/artist for MAD Magazine. A resume of Al’s formative years reads like a comic strip of traumatic cliff hangers, with cartoons by Jaffee and captions by Freud.
Jaffee’s story is a seamless collaboration of gifted writer and charismatic storyteller. Weisman carries Jaffee’s voice on her back so gracefully that the reader barely notices her presence. Al Jaffe’s Mad Life is a riveting, ridiculously beleaguered story of a child whose luck reversed itself so many times that going mad was a real possibility. Instead, Jaffee picked up a pencil and became a legend. What a hard road! What a generous book.
With fine artistic control, Weisman has drawn a poignant portrait of the artist as a young man who survived his youth and surmounted its traumas with desperately ingenious art