Inexplicable Entry in New York Times List of Holiday Gift Books

Because nothing says "Merry Christmas" like artful photographs of canisters containing the remains of dead people:

Library of Dust. Photographs by David Maisel. (Chronicle Books, $80). “Library of Dust” may well be this year’s most haunting book of images. It is a collection of photographs of copper canisters, each containing the unclaimed remains of a patient from a psychiatric hospital in Oregon (the same one used for filming “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”). Rivulets of chemical corrosion, almost oceanic in their intense coloring, run down the sides. Mr. Maisel’s book is a fevered meditation on memory, loss and the uncanny monuments we sometimes recover about what has gone before.

From the "Best Gift Books" section of the Holiday Gift Guide from the Times.

Comments

[Matt]

Damn, strong opinion.

Good thing I kept the receipt

[Pete]

I saw some of those photographs earlier this year, in Utne. Surprising as it sounds, the photos are quite beautiful, even if you know what's inside them.