An enthralling look at life's random connections

But Weschler, author of such little gems as ''Boggs: A Comedy of Values" and the Pulitzer Prize finalist ''Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder," has an ability to bring his reader around to his level of enchantment that is positively uncanny. ''Everything That Rises" samples several of the author's favorite subjects, including the Old Masters, political upheaval, and natural wonders, all of which he has covered extensively in the past. Yet the cumulative effect of reading these pieces, previously published in The New Yorker, McSweeney's, Salon, and elsewhere, is invigorating.

Weschler begins by tracing his fascination with convergences, most of them of the visual sort, back to a college lesson on John Berger's ''The Look of Things," in which the great critic noted the striking similarity between a famous photo of Che Guevara's corpse and Rembrandt's ''The Anatomy Lesson." Weschler writes that he remembers being dumbfounded by Berger's power of perception: ''This guy doesn't read his morning newspaper the way I or anybody else I know reads the morning newspaper."

Years later, Weschler undoubtedly reads his newspaper with that kind of vigilance. Some of his pictorial ''convergences," beautifully arranged in one of McSweeney's uncommonly handsome bindings, are truly remarkable -- Monica Lewinsky's weird likeness to the Mona Lisa, for instance, or a Jackson Pollock canvas considered alongside a rendering of deep space from a Life magazine of the painter's era.

Extraordinary too is the author's analogy between the Eastern European cultural thaw of the late 1980s and the clinician Oliver Sacks's famous work with catatonic patients. In a roundabout set of circumstances, the author notes with some delight, the Czech president Vaclav Havel took to wearing a work jacket he'd received from the crew on the film set of Sacks's ''Awakenings."