"The Art of Controversy" by Victor Navasky Writing last year in Slate, Farhad Manjoo made a convincing case that in the era of Jon Stewart; The Onion; the wiseacres on Twitter and Facebook; and the crowd-sourced humor that appears everywhere on the Web, political cartoons as a form are on life support. Mr. Manjoo studied recent cartoons, especially those from Pulitzer Prize winners, and declared: "Even the best ones traffic in blunt, one-dimensional jokes, rarely exhibiting nuance, irony or subtext." Bang, zoom, as Ralph Kramden used to say. This is not an argument that Victor S. Navasky picks up in "The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power," his convivial new assessment of the form. His is a book that mostly looks back rather than sideways or forward. He doesn't mention "Doonesbury," much less Tumblr. But "The Art of Controversy," if dated, has its consolations. Mr. Navasky is the former editor and publisher of The Nation, the venerable journal of the left that Calvin Trillin has warmly referred to as "a pinko magazine printed on very cheap paper." Mr. Trillin likes to call Mr. Navasky "wily and parsimonious," and in his book Mr. Navasky gets some of that wiliness onto the page. He's agreeable company, a crusty tour guide, a man who knew many of the great cartoonists of the 20th century and has stories to tell. One of these stories involves David Levine, the gifted caricaturist who gave The New York Review of Books its signature look. In 1984, asked to provide a drawing of Henry Kissinger, Levine composed a wicked one. It depicted Mr. Kissinger having intercourse with a naked woman whose head is planet Earth. Its title: "Screwing the World." The caricature was too much for The New York Review, but Mr. Navasky, a free-speech absolutist, was delighted to have it for The Nation. He was delighted until much of his staff revolted, arguing, among other things, that the drawing was sexist and might be misconstrued. Is the woman gripping the mattress in pleasure or pain? Christopher Hitchens, then a columnist for the magazine, was on hand for a tense staff meeting. A young female staffer complained that the woman seemed to in "the grip of passion." Mr. Navasky describes what happened next this way: "The white-suited, suave, British-born Christopher, who in those days enjoyed playing the office roué, leaned over and, gripping the young woman's hand, said, "Trust me, my dear, it's not the grip of passion." " The cartoon ran. There are many stories like this in "The Art of Controversy." Mr. Navasky knows everyone. When he was in Yale Law School in the late 1950s, he founded a satirical magazine called Monocle. Among its contributors were three of the artists discussed at length here: Levine, Edward Sorel and Robert Grossman. Mr. Navasky sketches the history of political cartooning in agreeable if less than scholarly fashion, going back as far as Leonardo da Vinci. He notes that Martin Luther employed posters to get his arguments across. He alights on key moments, like the Thomas Nast caricatures of Boss Tweed in the 1870s that helped bring the Tammany Hall politician down. Stop them damned pictures! Tweed complained. I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles. My constituents can't read. But they can't help seeing those damned pictures. Mr. Navasky traces the careers of visual satirists like William Hogarth, Honoré Daumier, David Low, Bill Mauldin, Herbert Block, Ralph Steadman and Doug Marlette. If you don't know the work of these men, there are better places to learn about them than in a 1,000-word book review, but one thing to know about Marlette is that he's the guy who once wrote about the blowback from his cartoons: "Democrats complain to the cartoonist. Republicans, I have noticed, go straight to the publisher. It hurts to type the words "these men" about the cartoonists listed above. Political cartooning has largely been a male form, a subject not addressed by Mr. Navasky. The only woman considered at any length in his book is Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945), the German painter and printmaker whose work is so dark and sublime that it barely counts as cartooning. The Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, awarded since 1922, has gone only to two women, Signe Wilkinson of the Philadelphia Daily News (1992) and Ann Telnaes of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate (2001). Scanning the list of the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonists is like scanning one of those Rolling Stone magazine lists of the "100 greatest guitarists." Women barely seem to exist. Mr. Navasky spends a good deal of time discussing the work of the valiant cartoonists at work in Muslim countries, where satire can still lead to beatings, imprisonment or worse. He discourses as well on the case of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which, in 2005, published a dozen cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, leading to wide protests by Muslim fundamentalists and more than 100 deaths. At the time, Mr. Navasky criticized publications in the United States, including The New York Times, that declined to publish the images with their reporting on the protests. But his thinking has evolved. He doesn't reprint those cartoons in his book, either. Among his reasons: "fear of retaliation by Muslim extremists"; "fear of booksellers wanting to avoid controversy"; "respect for Muslim sensibilities and desire to avoid needless provocation"; "the cartoons are available for all to see on the Internet, only a Google away." Among the best reasons to come to "The Art of Controversy" is that as it rolls along, Mr. Navasky strews, like breadcrumbs, a minimemoir of his own busy life and times. We read about everything from his Jewish childhood in New York City, where his first job was passing the contributions basket at the Ben Hecht play "A Flag Is Born," to stories about the blacklist era and his cantankerous office mates at The Nation. Mr. Navasky's volume is not a coffee-table book, though it does provide a nice selection of cartoons and caricatures. It reminds us that, whether we are talking about Thomas Nast or Stephen Colbert, Mark Twain's observation will always hold: "Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand."