Since Sept. 11, editorial cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall has become the proverbial man people love to hate, thanks to his strips and commentaries excoriating "Generalissimo El Busho," attributing the war in Afghanistan solely to oil-related greed, and mocking America's social and political response to the terrorist attacks. (One particularly controversial cartoon, which The New York Times pulled from its web site after a flurry of protests, castigated "terror widows," including Daniel Pearl's wife, as shallow opportunists gleefully sucking up the publicity and the Red Cross remuneration following their husbands' deaths.) Rall's work is sometimes both obvious and offensive, but at least he refuses to fall into lockstep with the increasingly timid American media. Still, even his loyal fans may have problems with his new "instant graphic novel," To Afghanistan & Back. The book collects some of Rall's Sept. 11 reaction strips, various columns on Afghanistan he wrote as a correspondent for The Village Voice, and a lengthy cartoon segment he drew to detail his post-Sept. 11 trip to Afghanistan to seek out the truth that conventional American media outlets weren't offering. From the start, Rall's snide prose marks him as a cynical, agenda-driven partisan, which casts his conclusions into doubt and limits his audience to those who already agree with him. His "graphic travelogue" provides a disappointingly short-sighted look at his personal discomfort in a country where recharging his satellite-phone was nigh-impossible and the fleas, cold, and boredom were constant distractions. Miraculously planted in the heart of an under-reported war, ostensibly looking for hidden truths, Rall devotes most of his space to detailing the immediate sights and complaining about Afghan opportunists, from soldiers who robbed journalists at gunpoint to guides and translators who robbed them through extortionate prices. "I'd expected to find pawns being victimized by cynical superpowers. And I did. But day after day of getting gouged, ripped off, and treated badly couldn't help but harden you," he complains, neglecting to address why the Afghan people should treat him as a welcome guest while his country, in his opinion, was carpet-bombing Northern Alliance cities solely for financial gain. In some ways, his self-centered, ground-level view does put a human face on the infographics and prepackaged, government-approved reporting of larger news sources, and his relentless subjectivity reveals the tiny details of Afghan life that others missed. In reporting on the reporters, Rall admits to a humanity that more professional journalists can't afford: Fear, anger, and a growing jaded detachment feature prominently in To Afghanistan & Back. But in focusing so closely on himself, he misses the larger story, and becomes the ugly American stereotype his cartoons usually mock.