Review of "Mirror Mirror"

Damn, book quotes are misleading. That’s the final thought I had as I finished Mirror Mirror by Mark Pendergrast. The tag that hooked me into it was “Want to save $160,000? Don’t send your son to college; slip him this book instead. It shoehorns an entire liberal arts education into a cultural history of mirrors”. Really? The question I had was, “What school were you planning on sending your son to, anyways?” Mirror Mirror is not a shoehorned liberal arts education. Mirror Mirror is a magazine article. A very long magazine article. A 370-some page magazine article, with all the insight, all the drudgery, all the sameness you’d find in a magazine article.

That’s not to say that it’s a terrible book; it isn’t. There are anecdotes of passing interest; small stories to pull out whenever you’re in need of something to say when conversation lags. Did you know that dolphins recognize themselves in mirrors? Yep. Did you know that humans have been fascinated by reflections since before the dawn of civilization? Yep. If you’re looking for anything deeper than that, though, this might not be the best book.

It’s a lackluster book, alright? Maybe I had the wrong expectations. I think that “natural history of…” books should be equal parts history and anthropology, with a small smattering of both hard and social sciences thrown in. This book is not that.

First, Pendergrast is too pedestrian of a writer to cover what seems to be too large of a subject for him. Here we are in Greece, tooling around with Archimedes. Next page, we’re in China, running with ancient mirror-makers. Flip a few more pages, and we’re in Mesoamerica, where, don’tcha know it, the Aztecs also had mirrors. In fact, it seems as if every civilization has or had mirrors. Wow. Pendergrast tells us this, and seems to expect us to be amazed by this. Guess how each and every civilization used mirrors? For looking at things. Amazing.

The book only picks up, ever so slowly, when Pendergrast (thankfully) gives up on cataloguing the cultural uses of mirrors in favor of ferreting out the scientific uses of them. He’s a science writer, and it shows. Non-scientific sections sag and the pages drag; for an example picked at random, “In England, belief in the supernatural was widespread”. But when he (paradoxically) gives up on mirrors and focuses on their use in astronomy, the writing picks up and the stories seem to spin themselves out easily. Bang! Out comes the story of mad King George III who had a love of stargazing and a willingness to sponsor inventive astronomers. Bang! Out comes tales of “the Leviathan of Parsontown”, a gigantic (just guess) telescope.

This book is not a crash-course in the liberal arts; it’s a roughshod history of astronomy. Correction: a history of Western astronomy, which, we all know, is the only type of astronomy that really matters. So why did Pendergrast keep on trying to slip in these cultural references and other uses of mirrors? They didn’t fit the story he was telling. It was embarrassing whenever the book went from being a general history of science to… something like being stuck talking to a boring relative with a vague grasp of history. The Renaissance, I tell you. It surely was a rebirth, or something. The Victorian age? How stuffy! And the 1920’s, they were roaring. What makes this even worse, even more insufferable, are the dog-scraps thrown to multiculturalism. Islamic civilization plays into this entire story as the keepers of the flame while Europe got its shit together, then disappeared from the story entirely. Middle and South American civilizations had some nice stuff, but vanished from the narrative following contact. Oh yes, the Chinese did some stuff too. So did the Japanese. These two stayed in the narrative the longest, but for some reason, were always attached to the end of a paragraph describing a European discovery. The book is Eurocentric, and the attempts at multiculturalism just reveal in stark contrast how Eurocentric it is.

I would like to have something pithy to say, something tied into mirrors or reflections, but this book gives me no ammunition. The title and the premise were better than the actual work. Upon reflection (haha! Had to work that in), I fear I know about as much as mirrors as I knew when I started reading. That’s about the most damning thing that can be said about this book.