Mirror Mirror: A history of the human love affair with reflection by Mark Pendergrast, Basic Books, $27.50, ISBN 0465054706 Reviewed by Simon Ings
MARK Pendergrast’s history of human reflection tries to make a virtue of virtuosity as it leaps from history, to science, to mysticism and to biography. It weaves together a small canon of serendipitous knowledge, a good scattershot for one book.
The trouble with detouring through half a dozen or more disciplines – optics, archaeology, psychology, cosmology and materials science – is that you lay yourself open to every smart-alec reviewer whose little nub of knowledge you left out.
We…
