Brian Curran

 This was the first book I ever read that made me laugh so hard I fell out of my chair, gasping. Much of it was over my head at the time (about 12 years old), but I've read it again several times, and continue to assign passages to my classes in art history, including my favorite passage, when, after suffering a series of increasingly unlikely attributions to Michelangelo, the author exclaims, "I never  felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead."