How to See the World: An Introduction to Images, from Self-Portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More

Author Nicholas Mirzoeff, professor of media, culture and communication, probably intended his new book How to See the World as a textbook for students in visual arts. But those students who will be assigned this book will be unlucky—this book is not going to be an easy read for them. The author obviously spent a long time researching his topic but he is very verbose and the text is not easy to read due to long paragraphs and long sentences. In fact, it’s hard to see what the focus of this book is. The introduction alone is long (twenty-seven pages) and feels like an essay, filled with unnecessary statistics and numbers hardly related to the subject. The chapter on selfie is full forty pages, and the chapter on visual stills from movies is twenty-two pages filled with details. Included are many fitting illustrations in small black-and-white but the quality is poor—they look as illustrations from a World War I newsprint, some so poor they are nearly indecipherable. The book ends with an extensive bibliography, list of sources for the illustrations, extensive chapter-by-chapter notes and an index. Most readers (other than assigned students) would not enjoy this book.