cover image This Land Was Made for You and Me (but Mostly Me): Billionaires in the Wild

This Land Was Made for You and Me (but Mostly Me): Billionaires in the Wild

Bruce McCall and David Letterman. Blue Rider, $25.95 (124p) ISBN 978-0-399163685

Writer and illustrator McCall and late night talk-show monarch Letterman have teamed up to offer a scathing and hilarious look at horrible fictional monuments built by wealthy members of the “one percent” to “ransack Nature’s bounty for the private pleasure of the demanding few.”) These include the only Montana hunting lodge with its own indoor airport (built by the heir to the “SwillMart discount” fortune); the rolling home-on-the road Gyro-Ball Rollerhome Lifesphere Mark I; an Olympic-size Jacuzzi powered by “the southwest Pacific’s first and only nuclear power plant”; and a three-thousand-mile-long tube built from hollowed out giant redwood trees featuring a private highway running straight from San Francisco to New York City. Those familiar with McCall’s cover paintings for the New Yorker will delight in his illustrations, each featuring a smooth precision that serves to underscore the hideous nature of each project. But Letterman is the real surprise here. Unshackled from the bonds of TV monologue jokes or top 10 lists, his dispassionate accounts of these monumental horrors display a ruthless precision that evokes humorist Robert Benchley, especially in his use of names, such as “millionaire ex-Department of Indian Affairs Casino Graft Director Huckster Frunk Jr. Sr.” Agent: Erin Malone, WME. (Nov.)