Drawing might seem an unlikely subject for the author, a naturalist whose previous works are The Company of Wolves, The Eagles/Dos Aguilas, California’s Wild Heritage and Tracks in the Sky. But Steinhart finds common ground in his two passions: “The naturalist and the artist are alike in their watchfulness.” He distinguishes drawing, which is about seeing, and painting, which is about composing, organizing what you see into a picture. “Drawing is…something you can do only if you are attentive,” he writes, sounding remarkably Ruskinian. John Ruskin is one of the many artists he quotes in this graceful, insightful book, along with Albrecht Dürer, Vincent van Gogh and Henri Matisse. He quotes van Gogh on a Japanese painter who struggled to depict a single blade of grass: “But this blade of grass leads him to draw every plant and then the seasons, the wide aspects of the countryside, then animals, then the human figure. So he passes his life, and life is too short to do the whole.” Despite the historical perspective—Steinhart goes back to classical antiquity for some of his allusions—this is not a chronicle of drawing’s place in art history. Nor is it a manual or a dogmatic treatise. Rather, it belongs to that old-fashioned and difficult-to-finesse genre of belle lettres. Steinhart moves from history to personal experience, psychology to anthropology. He reviews the neurology of face recognition and its importance to the socialization process. Humans have forty-three facial muscles, he notes, more than any other animal. As a amateur artist, he collects faces, sketching them in the field, on subways and in cafes. He sees drawing as fundamental, “driven…by something innate and human, by a constellation of long-standing behaviors and impulses shaped by human nature as by culture.” This anthropological observation is echoed by a witty and poetic series of similes; humans come back to drawing “like dogs to a bone, pigeons to roost, like waters to the sea.”