"The book explores [Josiah Wedgwood's] life in a disabled body (his right leg was amputated because of smallpox), his impulse to look for and create materials that would last forever, his support of the abolitionist cause, and it interrogates the project of biography itself, asking 'What does one do with the narrative leftovers ... inadvertently left behind as the fragile remains of the past?' Moon, assistant curator in European Sculpture and Decorative Arts department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, collects the fragments and assembles a new vessel to hold the life and times of this man, and in doing so, reveals to us something of ourselves right now."
–The Boston Globe
