"Like Henry Petroski's The Pencil or Galen Cranz's The Chair, this elegant and entertaining work makes us reconsider an object at once simple and extraordinary. From antiquity to the present, the mirror has consistently occupied a unique place in our imaginations: as a site of the divine or demonic, of lucidity or madness. Through its lens, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet shows how the material world has worked its way into our consciousness, affecting the...