Fiona Deans Halloran's captivating biography of nineteenth-century political cartoonist Thomas Nast is a must-read for anyone interested in politics, journalism, or visual culture during the Gilded Age.

Beautifully illustrated with sixty-three halftones, Halloran's tome deftly recounts the story of Nast, a German immigrant arriving in New York in 1848, as he rose from obscurity to fame, affluence, and political influence. And yet, the biography offers much more than the inspiring story of one man's attainment of the American Dream. In her delineation of the raw material that shaped Nast's artistic style, politics, and personal values, Halloran provides a cultural history of ethnic life in New York and a political history of late nineteenth-century America.

There are many fascinating treasures within its pages to be noted. Halloran examines Nast's sympathies toward black Americans (pre- and post-emancipation), his anti-Irish and anti-Catholic hostilities, and his fierce Republican partisanship. Through her analysis of his career from Frank Leslie's Illustrated News to Harper's Weekly, Halloran exposes the reader to the turbulent world of sectional conflict, urban unrest, and political turbulence of the 1860s and 1870s. And no biography of Nast would be complete without elaboration of the subjects that lit his fiercest passions during his heyday: his fight against the political corruption of Tammany Hall and his electoral campaigning for Ulysses S. Grant's presidential bid, among others.

In documenting Nast's professional career behind the scenes, Halloran illuminates the divisive state of illustrated journalism as it came of age. Nast developed a style apt to feeding the public's appetite for sensationalism and sentimentalism that seemed to be the linchpin for the growing success of the illustrated weeklies. He also helped to cement the role of artist–reporter as a voice of reform in American society. But the balance of power between newspaper owners, editors, and artists was in flux. Nast battled for years for artistic control and editorial freedom at Harper's Weekly with managing editor George William Curtis, a fight he ultimately lost, as the popular press consolidated power at the top and increasingly favored commercial viability over partisan loyalties.

One of the biography's greatest contributions is Halloran's analysis of Nast's part in the evolution of political cartooning as a visual practice. Nast's success was built on his ability to capture a recognizable likeness of his subject while employing exaggeration and satire to frame his message. Editor George William Curtis criticized Nast for his disrespectful visual treatment of prominent public figures, forcing Nast to spend years of his professional life justifying the right to caricature. Even after Nast's death, the controversy surrounding Albert Bigelow Paine's biography of Nast published in 1904 took the nature of cartooning to task, according to Halloran. Nast's former colleagues lambasted him for plagiarizing ideas and images from popular literary and visual sources, a convention at the core of Nast's synthetic style of utilizing recurring symbols and familiar popular allusions to maximize viewer comprehension. While contemporary readers might take these elements for granted as the basis of political cartooning, Halloran demonstrates that the historical development of the genre might have progressed differently if it were not for Nast's tenacity.

Halloran concludes that the key to Nast's success was his capacity to stir the emotions of his audience, fusing sentimentality and politics with his pen. While this claim is well supported, she missed an opportunity to reframe Nast's legacy in a way that would bridge historical and art-historical perspectives. Though Halloran mentions the freelance artistic work Nast did throughout his career, as a book illustrator and painter, her analysis centers on Nast's political art. Thus the biography reinforces the perception that his importance to history rests with his work as political commentator and caricaturist. Had she included some of these other images (which would be lesser known to most readers) and given more attention to his evolving technical skill, she could have assessed his contributions to the fine arts in addition to the spheres of popular journalism and politics.

Nonetheless, Halloran demonstrates that art can be a powerful political weapon and shaper of public opinion. While she faults Nast at times for his nativism, his superficial understandings of certain issues, and his viciousness, she ultimately casts him as an important political thinker, reformer, and agitator of his time, as someone who “wielded his pencil like a sword on behalf of the nation” (193). The mark he left with his artwork necessitates consideration by every student of American politics and culture of the Gilded Age, for which Halloran's biography should be required reading.