James Elkins’s How to Use Your Eyes invites us to look at–and maybe to see for the first time–the world around us, with breathtaking results. Here are the common artifacts of life, often misunderstood and largely ignored, brought into striking focus. With the discerning eye of a painter and the zeal of a detective, Elkins explores complicated things like mandalas, the periodic table, or a hieroglyph, remaking the world into a treasure box of observations–eccentric, ordinary, marvelous.