The adroit and magical mind-bending drawings of the Dutch graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972), especially his elegant animal metamorphoses and dreamy architectural illusions, fascinate viewers. Tremendously popular during the psychedelic era, his work now delights Internet enthusiasts, attracting 30,000 visitors a month to a Web site called World of Escher www.worldofescher.coma far more meditative gaze, and this large-scale, beautifully produced volume of 380 meticulously reproduced illustrations is the ideal showcase for Escher's timeless creations. His mesmerizing drawings, enthrallingly rich in texture and detail, are accompanied by well-chosen excerpts from his diaries and letters, musings that reveal his wit and poetic sensibility. "Perhaps all I pursue is astonishment, and so I try to awaken only astonishment in my viewers," Escher writes in a self-critical mood; but elsewhere he expresses the true nature of his quest: "I try to bear witness that we are living in a beautiful, ordered world, and not in a chaos without standards, as it sometimes seems."

Adult/High School-This marvelous book is a must for any collection containing works about art and artistic temperament. Not only does it present the wonderfully visionary drawings, paintings, and woodcuts for which Escher is so widely known, but it also includes excerpts from his writings. J. L. Locher, director of the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, provides the overview for the volume. Beautiful, full-color foldout copies exhibit some of Escher's most mesmerizing and intriguing works: Metamorphosis II, Day and Night, Up and Down, and Magic Mirror, to name a few. Many of the studies for these works are also included and demonstrate the planned, logical, and mathematical plane upon which Escher's fascinating conundrums are based. The two-page displays for Spirals and Mobius Strip II (Red Ants) are excellent cases in point. The book is filled with magical drawings created throughout the artist's career. Letters to family and friends and parts of lectures given by Escher describe the way he saw the world, his life, and his body of works. He "wandered in enigmas"; was bored by the right-angled boxes forced on mankind by gravity, "our tyrant"; and felt unsure of the "existence of a real, objective space." Even those who claim disinterest in art will find themselves drawn into Escher's exciting, inexplicable, virtual world.-Carol DeAngelo, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.