“To the outside world, scholarly activity must often seem exceedingly tedious and of questionable purpose. To those who practice scholarly inquiry, even imperfectly, the prospect of a single mind grasping and engaging its subject with focused intellect can be thrilling. That fascination may explain the revived appreciation of Stokes’s writings as records of his intellectual grappling with meaning in art, critical apprehension, and the creative psyche. The Coral Mind is the latest addition to this published appreciation, a collection of 12 intriguing essays on various aspects of Stokes’s critical inquiry. Guided by honest questions about why and how one reads Stokes today, the essay authors approach the reflections put forth by Stokes from differing perspectives that reveal the complexity of his observations. Stokes’s methods of inquiry do not consistently follow the prevailing theoretical approaches of 20th-century art historical scholarship of iconography, social history, or psychoanalysis, but they converge with all these methodologies in his uniquely subjective response to the space, place, and surface of the art object. Readers who enjoy questioning their own intellectual processes in encounters with created forms will appreciate the mind revealed in these essays. Summing Up: Recommended for graduate students and faculty/researchers.”

—W. S. Bradley Choice