REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY © BLOOMSBURY 2013 PRINTED IN THE UK Senses & Society Senses & Society DOI: ???????????? 113 VOLUME 8, ISSUE 1 PP 113–116 BOOK REVIEW Back in Touch The Deepest Sense. A Cultural History of Touch by Constance Classen Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012, 228 pages, ISBN 978-0-252-07859-0, $25.00 Reviewed by Sandy Isenstadt The body’s largest sensory organ, skin, has no shape of its own. It is lumpy, too, thicker in some spots than in others and unevenly woven through with nerves and blood vessels. It is myopic, so to speak: the world must come right up and knock for it to register that something is out there. Yet, once alerted, its range is enormous. It registers pain so searing that mind and body are paralyzed or, just as easily, touches so tender that mind and body are paralyzed. Skin even records time in various measures: the moment a finger traces along it; a scar from a distant event; colors that portend illness or recall a day at the beach; patches that document the passage of decades and folds that voice the gradual effects of gravity. Skin is also the most subjective of sense organs. When touching Sandy Isenstadt teaches the history of modern architecture at the University of Delaware. He is currently researching the novel luminous spaces introduced by electric lighting in the twentieth century. sandy.isenstadt@gmail.com +