Doonesbury's heroes.

FOR over three decades, cartoonist Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury has chronicled political history, and achieved iconic status in the process. But the chief reason the strip endures is not the political sarcasms it indulges--most of us do not, after all, need Trudeau to tell us the Watergate conspirators were "Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!"; and his other political views tend to be markedly less defensible--but rather its adept, sometimes breathtaking, observations of ordinary American life. For Trudeau is a master of the kind of social comedy that cuts very close to the bone; he is a sympathetic observer of mores whose sentiment strikes home precisely because the author studiously avoids sentimentality.

The new Doonesbury book, The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time (Andrews McMeel, 93 pp., $9.95), is one of the high points of Trudeau's career. In this volume, onetime college quarterback "B.D." loses a leg in Iraq, and copes with his new life as an amputee. Without bathos--and without political point-scoring--Trudeau depicts how real people survive this kind of physical and emotional devastation. The sense of humor is mordant and adroit. For example, a doctor is explaining B.D.'s amputation to one of the patient's fellow soldiers: "Your buddy's coming to, soldier. You can go see him ... You should know that few things are as traumatic as losing a limb. Amputees go through a grieving process, starting with denial, then anger ..." He is interrupted by a loud shout from behind the patient's curtain: "Son of a bitch!" The doctor continues: "Sometimes they skip the denial."

A few pages later, B.D. is on the telephone with his wife, and delivers the bad news in a destined-to-be-classic line: "Well, the good news is I'm finally down to my ideal weight ..." This is the sort of grace under pressure that John F. Kennedy idealized, and America right along with him; the kind of ice-cool good humor that Ronald Reagan showed as surgeons worked to save his life after the 1981 assassination attempt. Here, as elsewhere in his oeuvre, Trudeau has transcended politics to capture something very important about our national self-understanding. An important component of his success is his restrained style of illustration: In this instance, B.D. is not even in the frame as he delivers his bon mot. We see, rather, his wife, shown simply and poignantly at the other end of the phone line, a thought balloon with the words "Oh, God" poised above her head.

Other old friends turn up. Zonker Harris's visit to B.D.'s hospital is utterly characteristic: He brings along some "medical marijuana," whether the patient needs it or not. It is, of course, the thought that counts; and in this sweet, funny, and moving book, Garry Trudeau has expressed in pitch-perfect fashion the way America thinks and feels about its men and women deployed in Iraq. They are brave; they are ours.

* "Are you sure Colson is for real?" This skeptical question was addressed, some years ago, by a distinguished former U.S. secretary of state to Jonathan Aitken, a writer and former British cabinet member. In the excellent new book Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed (Doubleday, 436 pp., $24.95), we have Aitken's unambiguous response: Colson is the real deal. This detailed biography gives us the man in full, from political hardball, Watergate crime, and prison time to conversion and Christian activism. Few people have been involved as intimately as Colson in some of the most important efforts of our time: helping convicts turn around their lives (through the Prison Fellowship ministries), building unity among Christians (Colson is cofounder of Evangelicals and Catholics Together), fighting against genocide in Sudan, and changing America's overall culture through moral witness. This is a worthy book about a man whose importance is only beginning to be recognized.

* The conservative credentials of New York writer John A. Barnes are irreproachable; when, therefore, the redoubtable Barnes weighs in with a substantial volume entitled John F. Kennedy on Leadership: The Lessons and Legacy of a President (Amacom, 228 pp., $24), attention should be paid. The book is an impressive account of the skills that made JFK such a successful public figure. Barnes gives the reader the sense that the (understandable) reaction against the Camelot myth has gone much too far, that the time has come for an appraisal of Kennedy's genuine merits.

* In The Myth of Hitler's Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis (Regnery, 209 pp., $27.95), Rabbi David G. Dalin offers a serious debunking of some of the chief canards of the anti-Pius case. For example, Exhibit A in John Cornwell's 1999 bestseller Hitler's Pope was a passage from a letter Eugenio Pacelli had written some two decades before being elected to the papacy; the passage's supposed anti-Semitism was really the result of a tendentious mistranslation from Pacelli's original Italian.

Rabbi Dalin's brief is strong; I question only his decision to devote a whole chapter to the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. That this mufti was--unlike Pope Pius--a collaborator with Hitler is well known, and the case in defense of Pius is not appreciably strengthened by the suggestion of other possible suspects in the crime. Nonetheless, the fact--noted by Dalin--that the virulently anti-Semitic al-Husseini included among his young followers the future terrorist leader Yasser Arafat (who was also one of his relatives, albeit a distant one) is important to an understanding of the eliminationist anti-Semitism that continues to thrive in radical Islam.

Dalin's fine book ends on a hopeful note: The pontificate of John Paul II did much to heal the rift between Jews and Catholics. No honest observer of the late pope could doubt that today's Catholicism stands unequivocally against anti-Semitism in all its forms.

* The new book Afghanistan: A Companion and Guide (Odyssey, 768 pp., $29.95), by Bijan Omrani and Matthew Leeming, is one of the most gorgeous volumes I've come across in a long time; it's a lavishly illustrated account of a people and their tumultuous history. The United States has been accused of using its power to impose its culture on other nations; it would be more accurate to say that the U.S.'s global-democracy agenda seeks to strengthen the cultures that already exist. Afghanistan has been liberated--by U.S. intervention--from a socio-political straitjacket imposed by despots; this book shows the promise of the Afghans' own culture, based on the glories of its past.