In the acknowledgements in the back of This Land Was Made for You and Me (But Mostly Me), Bruce McCall and David Letterman thank a long list of people "for having to suffer through [McCall's] unconvincing and inarticulate description of what the book was supposed to be about, up until the day it was finished." And This Land is a weird book to explain: It's a collaboration between the Late Show host and the New Yorker cartoonist that looks like a children's book, with huge color paintings by McCall spread throughout. But the stories in the book are parodies of fluffy magazine profiles of high society figures. They mock the excess and the wastefulness of the wealthy with over-the-top satire. That's certainly the shortest way I could explain what the book is, but I don't know if it's the clearest.

Maybe the best way to explain is by example: Each of the stories focuses on a status symbol owned by a ridiculously wealthy one-percenter—a restaurant on the treetops of the Amazon Rain Forest, a mansion so big that items are delivered from one room to another by drone, a one-way personal highway that stretches from LA to New York, a train that allows people to shoot at bison (and humans) with paintballs. The book jabs at the wealthy, the environmentally wasteful, the callous who ignore those poorer than them, the American sense that bigger is always better, and it does so with a kind of merry goggle-eyed sense of wonder.

If Letterman's name wasn't on the cover, you'd barely be able to detect his handiwork. The writing is so in-character that it reads like it was written straight:

Butter "Moose" Hobb is the CEO of an aviation giant that was just awarded a four-billion-dollar contract from the U.S. Department of Defense to build one thousand new XXX fighters. "All our government work is profit rich," Buster blusters, "but this new XXX will break the bank. See, the XXX is so fast it lands before it takes off. So it actually never needs to be built, so that four billion in our pocket is one hundred percent profit."

So chummy is Buster with the Pentagon brass that as a surprise birthday gift they gave him a hypersonic stealth fighter as his personal jet. Painted in his wife's favorite shade of pearl white, the sleek speedster o f the substratosphere is the only secret U.S. military weapon ever given to a civilian.

The prose in This Land is like that, the breathless Town and Country-style worship of materialism and excessive wealth. McCall's artwork is clean and futuristic, making the absurd look obvious. I'm not entirely sure who the target audience for This Land is, but I found the book to be charming as hell, and more than a little funny.