The human face, Daniel McNeill tells us, is about 130,000 years old, dating from the last great ice age, and is our most powerful tool for gathering information on our environment and one another. Everyone knows, on at least some level, that the face is capable of conveying emotion and basic information with almost infinite nuance. And, unlike many popular conceptions of how the world operates, many of our facial myths have some basis in fact. For instance, eye contact—especially with an individual for whom we have passionate feelings of one sort or another—does indeed increase the heartbeat and/or perceptibly alter galvanic skin response, validating somewhat the old chestnuts of eye-contact-induced skipping heartbeats and crawling skin. In The Face, McNeill, like all good science writers, explains not just how this incredibly complex process happens, but what it means. The contemporary smile evolved from a reflexive baring of the teeth in response to confusion, surprise, or danger, he writes, and this probably says something about the nature of humor. And what, exactly, is beauty? Is a perception of facial beauty evolved, learned, cultural, universal, or even as important as we seem to think? A common question, certainly, but not one without relevance or answers. McNeill has a knack for asking and supplying wonderfully nuanced responses to all the great questions about one of the most common and mysterious objects in society.