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.
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We will ask questions such as: why didn’t he say anything about mirrors in nature? In particular, why didn’t he say anything about eyes? Had he only referred to the patina which makes cats’ eyes glow in the dark, his discussion of extromission, the classical theory of vision that asserted that eyes emit something that enable them to see, could have been made much more immediate and convincing.
And had he only mentioned Michael Land and Klaus Vogt’s independent discoveries that the compound eye of the lobster uses mirrors not lenses, he would surely have stumbled across Roger Angel’s plan to apply their knowledge to a new sort of X-ray telescope, a story sadly omitted from his otherwise excellent account of reflecting telescopes.
Mirror Mirror is an entertaining catalogue of human vanity and curiosity. It recounts – partially – how these antagonistic impulses fought over the mirror, and were sometimes reconciled in it.
Had Pendergrast gambolled modishly through some interdisciplinary space of his own devising, his omissions would have seemed integral to his design. But he simply cites one establishment account after another, and at worst, scrambles from history to science to biography and back again with the desperate predictability of a lungfish spasming its way from one shrinking puddle to the next.
Regardless of its merits, the pedants and the literalists are going to have this book for breakfast.