Roz Chast's cartoon collection, Theories of Everything (Bloomsbury Publishing $45), a massive 400-page hardcover collection of nearly three decades of her anxiety-laden cartoons for The New Yorker, received a major review by Michiko Kakutani in 'The Arts' section of Tuesday's New York Times.  Coming right on the heels of the Sunday Times' extensive graphic novel coverage (see 'N.Y. Times Book Review Does Graphic Novels'), Ms. Kakutani's rave review of Chast's Theories of Everything is further evidence of the increasing acceptance of the graphic storytelling medium.

Although Roz Chast is a master of the single panel format, there is a continuity of voice and perspective that unites her work and makes it as distinctive and as subtly self-reverential as of the major underground or 'alternative' artists.  Chast excels in evoking the wildly hypochondriac notions of the hyper-aware modern urbanite, who religiously follows all the print and TV 'health' coverage and is haunted by the ghastly potential of an ebola outbreak as well as the real life horror of middle-age physical degeneration.  Only occasionally, as in a bitter 'thank you' note to Ralph Nader, does Chast venture into the realm of politics, yet by channeling our collective contemporary neuroses her cartoons somehow manage to provide a superb reflection, as Michiko Kakutani notes of 'how we -- or at least some New Yorkers and suburbanites -- live today.'