Details: If you've ever doubted that good things come in small packages, take a look at the pocket-sized books in the Essentials series, which include volumes devoted to Salvador Dali, Vincent Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, and Edward Hopper. It's clear that the book's designers had some fun with the material, both visual and textural. Key words are italicized for the student reader. Quotations labeled "sound bytes" are highlighted with strips of color. There are rubrics every few paragraphs, so you can review "What's So Great About Salvador Dali" or "Phalluses, Crutches, William Tell: Authority Figures," if you're looking for something to toss into a conversation at a gallery opening. The pictures range from one-inch reproductions of not-so-important images to clear, large details of key works. Salvador Dali, the Spanish surrealist who died in 1989 after a long period of misery, comes off as a truly tortured soul in Robert Goff's sympathetic text. The book is designed to give a quick dip into the sea of surrealism, and its manic design is perfect for the artistic Cliff Notes crowd--smart teens discovering culture, young professionals looking for more than stock quotes in their lives, or even cognoscenti with gaps in their art history education. But Goff goes deeper than all of that. He accurately and kindly conveys Dali's prodigious natural talent, his psychosexual torment, his obsession with masturbation, his heterosexual ambivalence, and his profound attachment to his beloved wife, Gala, described as a shrew and a trollop. In the end, the book succeeds in giving a rounded view of an artist whose surrealist antics sometimes obscured his strange genius. --Peggy Moorman
