Cole, an African-American born in Nigeria and raised and schooled in America, is a very hot commodity these days.  The author of award winning novels (one of which I read three years ago in James Wood’s class at Harvard), the photography columnist for the Sunday New York Times, and a commentator in magazines, this is Cole’s first collection of essays, and a very fine effort it is.  There are four sections to the book including a brief epilogue about an episode of blindness he experienced, and blindness is a theme throughout the book, or rather its opposite, close reading.  In the first section,  Reading Things, Cole is a literary critic writing about some of his favorite authors–Naipaul, Transtromer, Walcott, Aciman, Hemon, Conrad, and most excitingly, Sebald! These brief, incisive pieces were a pleasure to read, especially since he used more words I had to look up than anyone since I’d last read Gopnik or Schjeldahl.  The second section, Seeing Things, focuses on his primary art form, photography discussing photographers, most of whom I had never heard of—an interesting addition to my interest in art.  The third section, Being There, describes his travels to Brazil, Africa, Palestine, Switzerland (where he visits the small village where James Baldwin lived in 1959 as the only Black man).  In all of these works, Cole expresses his respect and admiration for the individual living a life on this planet and urges filiation over alienation.    His attitude is one of acceptance, tolerance, and dignified awe at the struggles of everyday people and the unfairness and mistreatment that the world offers them.  He doesn’t shrink from condemning Obama as well as Bush for the drone executions the US is carrying out. He’s a fine writer, an inquiring mind, and a good person.  Claudia Rankine blurbs the books by saying it is an essential and scintillating journey. I look forward to his future work.