THE UGLY HISTORY OF BEAUTIFUL THINGS: Essays on Desire and Consumption, by Katy KelleherActivities that we tend to think of as distinctly human often have nothing to do with immediate survival. In “The Ugly History of Beautiful Things,” Katy Kelleher writes about the extreme and sometimes hideous lengths that people have gone to in order to obtain coveted objects of beauty: ruining their health, wrecking the planet, inflicting suffering on others. “I’ve never found an object that was untouched by the depravity of human greed or unblemished by the chemical undoings of time,” Kelleher writes. A journalist who writes about home and design, she realizes that it has been her job to encourage others to do the same. Kelleher points out that an element of ugliness can be part of an object’s appeal, distinguishing between the intriguingly beautiful and the boringly pretty.

---