Human beings are surrounded by surfaces: from our skin to faces, to the walls and streets of our homes and cities, to the images, books, and screens of our cultures and civilizations. This book traces the human relationship with surfaces from the deep history of human evolution, which unfolded across millennia, up to the contemporary world.
"Surfaces have a bad press: superficial, skin deep, ersatz, they are what gets scratched when depth is lacking. With this wonderful history of the world as a collage of surfaces, Joe Amato sets the record straight. Surfaces define our relationship to the world, they have their own poetry, aesthetics, science, glamour and wonder. My chagrin at not having thought of this idea first is wholly obviated by the fact that Amato has done such a gorgeous job."-Philip Ball, author of Shapes: Nature's Patterns: A Tapestry in Three Parts
"More immediate than Foucault, deeper than Bryson, highly original, deeply sensitive, and amazingly informed, Surfaces is one of the great books of the twenty-first century. It is eloquent and beautiful, based on solid thought and spelled out with imagination, emotion, refined speculation, and a rich yet simple language. Joseph Amato's intricate eye for the details of daily life seamlessly joins history, art history, natural science, and anthropology in a narrative of natural and artificial surfaces and the depths beyond them." -Jeffrey Burton Russell, Emeritus Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara
"Surfaces is utterly unique and almost defies categorization. Amato romps over vast landscapes of intellectual and artistic terrain, demonstrating intellectual breadth, insight, and creativity. This is an exciting book-bold, provocative, poetic-that invites contemplation and opens the reader's mind to the depth and complexity of the human experience."-Donald A. Yerxa, senior editor, Historically Speaking
"Who would have thought of writing a history of surfaces? Joseph Amato displays superior scholarly range and imagination in this lively, flowing, and often inventive study of humans' relationship with their world. Surfaces offers us many intriguing and frequently surprising insights about a subject that we have never thought of in quite this way before. This is an enormously ambitious and thought-provoking book."-Allan Megill, author of Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice
"Amato presents a thoughtful and persuasive case about the omnipresent place, role, power and importance of surfaces."
