On the Money: The Economy in Cartoons is a coffee-table collection of more than 400 cartoons drawn from the pages of The New Yorker magazine from 1925 to 2009.

The book is sturdily produced and the cartoons -- involving money, taxes, spending, investing, business operations and class-status -- are clever, insightful and ironic. Because they’re organized by decade, I enjoyed tracking trends in content (living large in the ‘20s; economizing in the ‘30s; patriotism and inflation in the ‘40s; the emergence of the IRS and specific companies and a more prominent role of personal finance in later decades; the cycles of growth and recession throughout) and trends in the art itself (visually dark images early on; lighter, sparer drawings of late).

And what locks this book into the 5-star category is Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent Introduction -- a theory of humor that acknowledges the differing rules of business life (realism) and personal life (romanticism) and suggests that “funny” happens when the rules are misapplied. (For more about the process of creativity and cartooning, take a look at Robert Mankoff’s The Naked Cartoonist.)

For terrific social commentary -- as opposed to laugh-out-loud humor -- I highly recommend this collection. ( )