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Describe your latest book.
Glittering Images, which took five years to write, is a concise survey of Western art, starting with Egyptian tomb paintings and ending with the digital revolution. There are 29 chapters, all illustrated in full color, which trace the evolving styles of art down the centuries from antiquity to modernism. The last chapter is on George Lucas's Revenge of the Sith, the sixth and most recent film made in the Star Wars series. I declare that its operatic climax on the volcano planet of Mustafar is far more powerful on the visual and emotional level than anything else in contemporary art.

Glittering Images was intended as a companion book to my last release, Break, Blow, Burn, which was a study of poetry aimed at the general audience. Today people are swamped with visual clutter — text messages, email, Twitter, flashing online ads, manically edited TV commercials. Glittering Images invites the reader to slow down and relearn how to see in a focused, stable, contemplative manner. I especially want to reach young people who have had little or no exposure to great art. The fine arts ...