Reviews

Julia Keller, The Chicago Tribune

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“The Thing Itself” includes some dazzling, beautifully crafted essays. Most start out gently, with a sort of loose, meandering, laid-back feel to them, but before you know it, you’re being whipped about in the churning white water of Todd’s serious thinking about things. What, he wonders, do we mean by authenticity? Or sincerity? How do objects confer status? Does something become more valuable just because it’s old? Todd’s writing is gorgeous. And wise. Which is not to say I agree with everything he says. In fact, after reading the opening paragraph in an essay titled “Self and Selves,” I realized that I took issue with every sentence in the paragraph—every single one! But the measure of an essay’s worth isn’t whether or not you agree with it. The measure is what kind of hold it has on your imagination, how strenuously it makes you think, how much space it takes up in your mind after a single reading. By that calculation, “The Thing Itself” is a small masterpiece - and “small” only because of its brevity, not its scope.

—Julia Keller, The Chicago Tribune