At four pages, eleven paragraphs (not incuding the introductory quote), thirty five sentences, and (sorry Georges) more words than I really wanted to count despite how cool it would have looked here, Ellis Island is a tome. It made me more intensely examine my own identity than all three hundred pages of What Color is Your Parachute even came close to doing. (Actually, I only read about four pages of that one too, but I could tell where it was going.) Ellis Island, however, was a complete surprise. The bit about what it means to be a Jew and the fact that that aspect of his identity is more concretely definied by its abscence than its presence, is profound. I mean, other people have said it, certainly, but this is, without a doubt, the clearest presentation I have encountered. I think it's particularly telling that he should set these musings in America, at Ellis Island. We, as Americans, particularly as white Americans, have a watered down and dissapated culture defined not by who we are, what we love, how we live etc., but what, ultimately, we are not. This small work was a four-page invitation to examine my relation to my roots, my country, and my culture. Ugh. I loved it.

This book is composed of excerpts from Emile Male's more weighty tomes on French religious art. Unfortunately, the result is a patchwork of ideas that are not well connected and not clearly explained. A reader interested in Gothic art, for example, would learn more reading Male's more complete "The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century." "Gothic Image" is longer and perhaps more detailed than "Religious Art from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century," but "Gothic Image" is easier to read because the ideas are presented more completely.

This book is indispensable to the serious art historian