This book doesn't begin auspiciously. Of the first of the not-quite 100 painters, sculptors and poets to whom he grants an entry in this book, Alex Katz says "Fra Angelico could really paint." As if this is news. Or informative.Most artists get only one or two paragraphs and one illustration in this book, with a select few (Leonardo, Rembrandt, Renoir, Picasso, and Vermeer among them) getting up to two 2-page spreads. The paragraphs aren't always dazzling -- some even mention mainly works that aren't illustrated, or talk mostly about when AK met the artist, or when the artist said something nice about AK's work. A few artists in, I was regretting that I'd been duped by an advertisement in a trendy literary journal to shell out for nothing more than a self-indulgent exercise of a nonagenarian star of the New York art scene, whom no one had the heart to call out when he was being dull.But by the time I was about 1/3 of the way through, I was really enjoying the book. It was becoming easier to see what AK meant when he was distinguishing between "image-making" and "painting," and by "plastic" backgrounds. By sticking with an alphabetical system of organization, the selection of images juxtaposes works from many different genres and periods, quite unlike a typical art book. This produced some wonderful effects. Some of the artists, albeit from my own generation (born in the 1950s or 1960s) were new to me. And some works by artists with whom I had some familiarity, such as James A.M. Whistler's "Nocturnes" and Jackson Pollock's "She-Wolf," were either new to me or long-forgotten. AK isn't afraid to be critical, such as in his treatments of Tiepolo and Bernini -- though the photograph AK includes for the latter is amazing.Not everything works. AK includes a number of sculptors whose work isn't always easy to get a feeling for from a photograph. Even as to painters, I occasionally found it impossible to see all the effects AK mentioned from the one example of the artist's oeuvre that he provides (e.g., Carmen Herrera, Albert Pinkham Ryder). And the poets who get their own entries are, aside from Gertrude Stein, all from the mid-20th Century New York scene, and so may be unfamiliar to many readers. The fact that only one of them is actually quoted (Frank O'Hara) may do little to broaden their audience. (They aren't, though, the only poets whom AK invokes in the book -- his comparison of Paolo Veronese to Horace is marvelously apt.) Still, by the end I felt that the vast majority of entries were enlightening, even if the works AK chose were more eloquent than his remarks about them.If you have some familiarity with AK's work, the book is full of "aha" moments. By the time you get to Thutmose, the ancient Egyptian sculptor of the famous bust of Nefertiti in Berlin, and Utamaro, one of the great masters of Japanese woodblock prints, it's easy to understand why he, of all artists, should admire them. For this reason, I strongly suggest going through the book in sequence on a first reading, instead of dipping in randomly. And, contrary to my initial apprehensions, I strongly recommend this book: I'm very happy to have it around.