Known and Strange Things

'Seeing Things,' the photography section, is the most commonly named weak spot: one reviewer says “insights on photography are often pedestrian and there are too many,” and another describes finding the “essays on photography to be the blandest” in the whole book. Several pieces read as short, deadline-driven magazine work rather than fully developed arguments, closer to beginnings without follow-through, and Cole returns to James Baldwin often enough across the collection that a few readers find it repetitive by the back stretch. The political essays on Obama and American power strike some readers as too pointed for a general essay collection. Because it's assembled from previously published pieces, a few readers feel it reads less like a unified book and more like a bundled set of journalism.