Lives of the Artists: Masterpieces, Messes (and What the Neighbors Thought).

This collection is even more arbitrary than the one before because it picks nineteen artists (five women) from the entire Western canon, and only Hokusai from the East. They all allegedly share "interesting lives and interesting neighbors," and each four-page chapter reads like a Readers Digest gossip column: jokes about one of Leonardo's "disasters" because he failed to read "instructions all the way through," or Nogushi's racing up "stairways like a tiger." Such tidbits can add pleasant facets to the more traditional expositions in most art books. The full-page portraits and vignettes also are a tad tongue-in-cheek but informative. Ending each chapter is a brief set of anecdotes about objects each made. A simplistic page of art terms makes it clear that the book is for the innocent reader of most any age.