A Communion of Shadows: Religion and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017, $90.00). Pp. 312. isbn 978 1 4696 3648 1

In addition to its focus on religious issues, this book could serve as an introduction to how the earliest forms of photography enacted new epistemologies that altered people's ways of defining themselves and their faith. In doing so, the author consistently demonstrates respect for their religious practice, and in large part avoids condescension or irony while analyzing the gullibility that surfaces, for example, in discussion of spirit photography as she deconstructs some of the truth claims made about these images. [...]Lindsey largely ignores why death photographs, which were wildly popular from the 1850s onwards, virtually disappeared soon after World War I. Nonetheless, Dr. Lindsey's commitment and evident passion for her subject, in addition to her brisk and engaging writing and her willingness to deftly introduce humor at crucial junctures, helps make this an insightful, useful, and highly readable book.