A follow up to 2014 Eric Hoffer Award Finalist Return Trip, Strange Beauty is a further look at aesthetic and artistic biases, information processing and the limits of human knowledge. The short book is written in the author's unique non-linear style mixing academic insight with humor and offbeat subjects. As he wrote in Return Trip, "My job as a writer isn't to make the hard easy. It's to make the hard hard." Cycleback is an art historian and award-winning author who has written extensively in the areas of art history and authentication, cognitive science and philosophy. He was a 2013 Eric Award Finalist for his book Conceits: Cognition and Perception, and his guides Judging the Authenticity of Prints by the Masters and Judging the Authenticity of Photographs were the first comprehensive books on the subjects published in China.