Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum effectively presents the dominant present-day academic ways of understanding museums and contains a range of material not duplicated in any other volume. And considering its length, the book is reasonable in price. The editors’ introductions are lucid, and the essays, which consider a range of topics, are strong. I will begin this review by briefly summarizing the subjects of the essays in the various parts of the book and then offer my evaluation of the volume as a whole. In the first section, which addresses the rhetoric of historiography, Hayden White argues that there is no objective way of showing the past as it really was. Michael de Certeau supplements that account through a historical understanding of psychoanalysis. Jean-Louis Déotte describes the founding of the Louvre, a museum that invented the modern “art of fragments” (53); Stephen Bann explains the poetics of the Musée de Cluny; and Mieke Bal analyzes what might be called collecting narratives. Collecting, she suggests, is a form of fetishism. The second section is devoted to histories of museums. Mary Carruthers presents the art of memory; Giuseppe Olmi examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian cabinets, which are linked to...