Aline Kominsky Crumb was born Aline Ricky Goldsmith in Long Beach, New York, in 1948 and grew up in a chaotic household behind a tidy suburban facade. Her mother came from a well-to-do family and found success as an ad agent; her father was a small-time businessman and possible small-time crook, who died of cancer when his daughter was nineteen. Her escape into the counterculture of the 1960s led her to New York City, Tucson (with her first husband, Carl Kominsky), and, finally, San Francisco, where she became prominent in the underground comix scene of the late part of the decade and met and

When Der Brand, Jörg Friedrich's best-selling history of the Allied bombings of German cities during World War II, was published in Germany, in 2002, it unleashed a firestorm. For some, the notion that the British and American air campaigns against cities like Dresden, Hamburg and Essen constituted a new and atrocious war, utilizing weapons of mass destruction and targeting civilians rather than industrial centers, is problematic in itself. But Friedrich's harrowing descriptions of the incineration of men, women, and children—a story that aligned his book with other taboo-confronting efforts