You won’t look in the mirror the same way again.
Reflections on the history of our current fascination with faces.
In her lavishly illustrated and intellectually provocative study, British historian Bound-Alberti goes back through Western history to uncover how faces became so significant to us and to analyze our preoccupation with optimizing and altering the way our faces appear to ourselves and those who view them. “For most of human history,” she writes, “portrayals of the face have been generic.” People only needed to recognize a few other people in the core group in which they lived, and most people would not have had or felt any need for a mirror in which to regard their own face. Only with the Renaissance did people begin to see a face depicted in a portrait as a “window into the individual soul.” Bound-Alberti pays particular attention to how evaluation of faces and the alleged virtues or vices they reveal can be used to reinforce power structures, with the features common to white Western Europeans being valued and those of people from Africa or Asia devalued. She analyzes with precision the effect on perception of the face of the advent of photography, followed by social media, and raises troubling questions about the risks of using surgery to modify the face. The author—who herself lives with prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, and leads the Interface project, dedicated to studying the history and ethics of face transplants—is uniquely situated to document this subject. She encourages the reader to speculate about where she falls on the range between face-blind and those with “super-recognition”—individuals who can “apparently recognize 80 percent of the faces they have seen once before,” and she sensitively explores the pros and cons of the controversial face-transplant procedure, based on extensive interviews with those who have received them.
You won’t look in the mirror the same way again.Pub Date: June 9, 2026
ISBN: 9781538766538
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
