For an Artist Monograph this book is very well done. The reproductions of paintings are excellent and are the actual size of the small paintings. The commentary by Tamara Jenkins is comfortably readable and informative. The pros and cons of this volume are really dependent on your views of Lisa Yuskavage's art.
Yuskavage paints cartoon like women with huge breasts, impossibly small waists, and googly eyes. Her message is fairly clear: she is presenting the female figure as the sex symbol and mindless Barbie Doll which in any other artist's hands would have feminists up in arms. But since these well-crafted but pungent tongue-in-cheek portraits are painted by a woman, that makes it all an insider's joke.
Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin are the two most well known artists working in this Pop Movement distorted realism that pokes fun at the old Vargas girls and pinups. That is working for them: they both sell their works well. It is just that these works are one-note songs and they produce ennui after the first quick viewing. This book at least lets us see the initial ideas of an artist who knows what she is doing - and making a lot of money doing it! Grady Harp, December 2004