Tee Time in Berzerkistan


Book Description

No rogue regime ever needed its evildoing professionally reframed more urgently than Greater Berzerkistan, whose president-for-life Trff Bmzklfrpz (pronounced "Ptklm") needs to spin a recent round of ethnic cleansing. Fortunately, the pariah state (and its 50-hole golf course, built overnight by Kurds and Jews) borders Iran, a fact that K Street uberlobbyist Duke is retained to parlay into a major U.S. arms package. Meanwhile, across town, the crumbling of the newspaper industry crushes Rick Redfern's hope of continuing employment. After 35 years at the Washington Post, he is ejected into the blogosphere, where his prose now battles it out with that of 1,186,783,465 rivals, including Roland Hedley, who takes the art of Twittering to a new self-reverential low. Truly, everyone in Doonesburyland is struggling to adapt. While white Washington insiders scramble to acquire some African American friends, longtime black conservative Clyde schemes to score Obama's Blackberry number, Clinton-era Dems are forced to attend the president-elect's "No Drama School," and Jimmy Thudpucker once again reboots his career--this time as a cell phone ring-tone artist. No one ever said change was pretty.




Branding Post-Communist Nations


Book Description

Nation branding--a set of ideas rooted in Western marketing--gained popularity in the post-communist world by promising a quick fix for the identity malaise of "transitional" societies. Since 1989, almost every country in Central and Eastern Europe has engaged in nation branding initiatives of varying scope and sophistication. For the first time, this volume collects in one place studies that examine the practices and discourses of the nation branding undertaken in these countries. In addition to documenting various rebranding initiatives, these studies raise important questions about their political and cultural implications.




Popular Geopolitics and Nation Branding in the Post-Soviet Realm


Book Description

This seminal book explores the complex relationship between popular geopolitics and nation branding among the Newly Independent States of Eurasia, and their combined role in shaping contemporary national image and statecraft within and beyond the region. It provides critical perspectives on international relations, nationalism, and national identity through the use of innovative approaches focusing on popular culture, new media, public diplomacy, and alternative "narrators" of the nation. By positing popular geopolitics and nation branding as contentious forces and complementary flows, the study explores the tensions and elisions between national self-image and external perceptions of the nation, and how this complex interplay has become integral to contemporary global affairs.




Day One Dictator


Book Description

As Trump returns to the ballot in 2024, this collection of Doonesbury Sunday comics about the former (and possibly future) president will hit just ahead of one of the most significant election cycles in decades. “I want to be a dictator for one day.” – Trump Volume V of the Doonesbury Trump Quintet tracks the ever-metastasizing Big Lie, with Mark offering a month-by-month calendar to track the Former Guy’s burgeoning court dates. Unfortunately for the Trump Innocence Project, it turns out almost all the witnesses are former aides or allies. How did Dems manage to weaponize Trump's friends? While readers puzzle over that, they can also play a life-of-crime board game — Donald Trump's Spree. The only way to win, of course, is to cheat, but no problem — it’s been normalized. Fortunately, this volume also features the Doonesbury regulars, with Alex and Toggle raising three free-range kids and Mike happily wallowing in grandpahood. Mr. Covid retires, proud to know his wilier, more adaptive descendants will keep taking the fight to the unvaxxed. Joanie thinks Rick’s latest story is the best thing he's ever written: too bad it was actually authored by ChatGPT. Roland and Rascal, wading through Ukrainian snowdrifts, blunder into a Meta crack-up. Not even fantasy is making sense, but in Day One Dictator, G.B. Trudeau gives it his best shot yet. Garry Trudeau is in his 36th year of trying to make Donald Trump go away. Nothing’s worked.




Former Guy


Book Description

The continuation of Pulitizer Prize-winning cartoonist G.B. Trudeau's bestselling Trump series, this fourth (and final?) volume chronicles Doonesbury in the time of Trumpism. Though the title doesn't mention him by name, Former Guy looms large in American politics and culture even after leaving the Executive Office of the President. This latest Doonesbury collection picks up in the heat of the 2020 presidential campaign, chronicles the infamy of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and continues into the next administration, the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, and the many manifestations of Trumpism in global politics and American life. Over 50 years into his legendary career, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist G.B. Trudeau is still the most accomplished satirist in comics, and his ongoing comics coverage of Donald Trump are unparalleled in breadth and humor.




LEWSER!


Book Description

A mirthful and merciless skewering of the Trump administration from the senior statesman of political cartooning, Garry Trudeau. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist whose acclaimed Yuge!: 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump blew up the bestseller list, G.B. Trudeau's third (and final?) collection of Doonesbury Trump cartoons takes readers through the dark heart of Trump's presidency and into 2020 election mania. Including two years' worth of original Doonesbury Sundays, full-color spreads, and 18 previously unpublished strips, the completion of Trudeau's Trump trilogy arrives just as the 2020 election is in full swing.




#SAD!


Book Description

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist whose acclaimed Yuge!: 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump blew up the bestseller list, comes the sequel millions prayed would be unnecessary. #SAD!: Doonesbury in the Time of Trump tracks the shocking victory, the inept transition, and the tumultuous eternity of POTUS’s First 500 Days. Citizens who rise every morning in dread, braced for disruptive, Randomly Capitalized, atrociously grammarized, horrably speld, toxic tweeting from the Oval Office, can curl up at night with this clarifying collection of hot takes on the First Sociopath, his enablers, and their appalling legacy. Whether resisting or just persisting, readers will find G.B. Trudeau’s cartoons are just the thing to ease the pain of remorse (“Could I have done more to prevent this?”) and give them a shot at a few hours of unfitful sleep. There are worse things to spend your tax cut on.




Squared Away


Book Description

“In a class by itself.” —Jules Feiffer on Doonesbury This all-color volume celebrates the marriage of Alex and Toggle, an event which optimistically confirms that life, like Doonesbury, rolls on. Indeed, how remarkable that the strip has so embraced and occupied its era that three generations of one family have married within its panels. Gathering their kith and kin around them at Walden, the wise but wounded soldier-artist and the brilliant but insecure techhead make a promising team for the years ahead, well-rounded yet squared away. Doonesbury’s fifth decade finds the largest rep company in the history of comic strips fully and widely engaged. Like so many flesh-and-blood fellow citizens, key characters now struggle with dramatic career change and job stress. And the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to reverberate through the lives of others, as the strip illuminates their experiences with an attentiveness unparalleled in popular culture. Amid the relentless unfolding of unexpected storylines, the strip’s second and third generation characters increasingly take center stage, and the youngest regular, Sam, comes of age—literally in the blink of an eye—as the newlyweds prepare to welcome twins. It never ends, and how lucky for readers. “Most comic strips run out of creative energy after their initial inspiration,” notes Garry Wills. “Trudeau has just kept improving, year after year.”




Red Rascal's War


Book Description

Readers and critics were wowed by G. B. Trudeau's epic masterpiece 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective, and they'll rejoice when they see this beautiful follow-up volume. Featuring an innovative format and an all-new collection of strips, Red Rascal's War is the first all-color Doonesbury book ever. Both Trudeau and his fans have followed Doonesbury's ever-expanding cast through four decades of cultural turbulence and change. With its arresting cover and rich interior, Red Rascal's War showcases the most recent additions to a body of work the New York Times admiringly refers to as "a sprawling masterwork." "[Trudeau is] Dickensian in his range of characters," writes Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books. "Trudeau has just kept improving, year after year, in part because he stays so close to changing events. . . . He has never been better than in the last six years." From the exploits of Afghan legend-in-chief Sorkh Razil to the pipe dreams of Malibu's top nanny Zonker Harris, and from the "no more chill pills" intervention by Obama's aides to the way-cool love of a headbanging war vet and his MIT-grad gal, Doonesbury marches wildly on. "What else is guaranteed to make you think, feel nostalgic, and laugh out loud at least once a page?" --Karen Holt, O Magazine




The Weed Whisperer


Book Description

“I don’t read Doonesbury. He glorifies drugs.” —Former White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater Welcome to the age of pivots. Two centuries after the Founding Fathers signed off on happiness, Zonker Harris and nephew Zipper pull up stakes and head west in hot pursuit. The dream? Setting up a major grow facility outside Boulder, Colorado, and becoming bajillionaire producers of “artisanal” marijuana. For Zonk, it’s the crowning reset of a career that’s ranged from babysitting to waiting tables. For Walden-grad Zip, it’s a way to confront $600,000 in student loans. Elsewhere in Free Agent America, newlyweds Alex and Toggle are struggling. Twins Eli and Danny show up during their mother’s MIT graduation, but a bad economy dries up lab grants, compelling the newly minted PhD to seek employment as a barista. Meanwhile, eternally blocked writer Jeff Redfern struggles to keep the Red Rascal legend-in-his-own-mind franchise alive, while aging music icon Jimmy T. endures by adapting to his industry’s new normal: “I can make music on my schedule and release it directly to the fans.” He’s living in his car. G.B. Trudeau’s Doonesbury is now in its fifth decade, and has chronicled American life through eight presidents, four generational cohorts, and innumerable paradigm shifts. His political sitcom Alpha House, starring John Goodman, is available on DVD and by streaming from Amazon Prime. For the record, Trudeau always inhaled back in the day. As President Obama once explained, “That was the point.”




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