'' THE FACE : A CULTURAL HISTORY '' : BOOK REVIEW SNIPPET

' Did mirrors ruin the world? ' The Face : A Cultural History. By Fay Bound Alberti, Grand Central.

From a young age my son demonstrated a keen ability for facial recall. As we watched movies and television shows, he might blurt out - at seeing Ray Milland guest-star as a murderous botanist in a '' Columbo '' episode :

That same actor had played a villainous husband in '' Dial M for Murder,'' released two decades earlier, and which we'd watched more than a year prior. Actors making brief cameos left equally striking impressions.

According to Fay Bound-Alberti, a professor of modern history at King's College in London, the 2 percent of the population who possess the skill, one that apparently cannot be taught, are known as '' super recognisers '' a term coined by Harvard researchers.

As we learn in '' The Face, '' a cultural unpacking of our most scrutinized organ, another 2 percent, on the other side of the bell curve, manage prosopagnosia - or face blindness - a condition that makes remembering faces and identities attached to them a persistent challenge.

Bound-Alberti counts herself among the affected [ so does Brad Pitt ]. Once, she failed to recognize her own daughter in a nursery school classroom.

Though the social fallout of living with this sort of limitation is surely not negligible, Bound-Alberti refrains from lingering on the tarmac of the affliction memoir.

Her interests residing outside her own neurology, she has produced an ambitious, entertaining survey of human perception : how we consume images of ourselves and one another and how that process has evolved over thousands of years via art technology, medicine, psychology and bureaucracy.

Along the way, the book chronicles many relevant firsts. The beginning of facial surveillance in the United States can be traced to the mandate for passport photographs, implemented in 1914 in response to World War 1.

For more than a decade Americans could supply a casual snapshot of themselves, by 1926, the government insisted on the now-familiar headshots of themselves in which all identifying features are visible.

!WOW! thanks Ginia Bellafante.