Synopses & Reviews
From ancient myth (Actaeon's illicit glimpse of the bathing Diana), to eighteenth-century France (when two voyeurs sparked a bloody anti-royalist riot on the Champs-de-Mars), to modern-day advances in microscopy and photography, Gonzalez-Crussi surveys the ways in which, through the sense of sight, perceiver and perceived are inextricably joined, each affecting the other in a profound way, and how our awareness of this union has led to millennia of curious preoccupations.
Review
"Intriguing and thoughtful work from a doctor and thinker." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Gonzalez-Crussi characteristically brings literary as well as medical knowledge to bear on each kind or facet of seeing, successfully demonstrating that each is a distinct phenomenon...providing the kind of deep, slow, cultivated reading pleasure that pretty much only he affords." Booklist
About the Author
F. Gonzalez-Crussi is currently Professor Emeritus of Pathology at Northwestern University Medical School. He is the author, most recently, of On Being Born and Other Difficulties. His other books include Notes of an Anatomist, The Five Senses (Los Angeles Times Book Prize nominee), Suspended Animation (a New York Times Notable Book), The Day of the Dead, and There Is a World Elsewhere.