Books: Matchstick Historian

Low's AUTOBIOGRAPHY (387 pp.)—David Low—Simon & Schuster ($5).

David Low, perhaps the most famed political cartoonist of modern times, worked over the faces of the great with a wooden matchstick dipped in India ink. For his own self-portrait he has chosen pastels.

The exhibits in Low's human menagerie —scowling, smirking, always true to life, yet slightly absurd—have stayed in the minds of millions. Apart from talent, all great cartoonists need a point of attack from which to enfilade their natural and necessary enemy—the great. Low's point of attack was his own New Zealand background. His...