Forms of Life: Aesthetics and Biopolitics in German Culture. By Andreas Gailus. Ithaca, NY: Signale, 2020. xxiii + 383 pages. $115.00 hardcover, $29.95 paperback, $19.99 eBook.

social sciences, as seen for example in the essays of Derek Hillard, Martz, MuellerGreene, and Jared Poley. Particularly in the realm of emotions, which are challenging to pinpoint and to study scientifically, cultural artifacts can help tease out nuances that do not show up on fMRI imaging. The only small drawback is related to the book’s index. In essay volumes, indexes are welcomed as they can illuminate productive connections across essays that may not be apparent upon first glance. However, it seems that this index was not double-checked after the pagination was set in its final form. A quick spot check of this work’s index reveals that some entries are off by a few pages (e.g., the second listings for fMRI and for Wolfgang von Kempelen). This is only a minor annoyance and does not detract from the volume’s overall worth. These types of errors happen sometimes, and they are not necessarily the responsibility of the volume editors as the book is often out of their hands by that stage of production. Pointing out the mistakes here is intended as a reminder to publishers that readers of the hard-copy versions of their books still rely on traditional indexes rather than on an electronic search function that makes the page numbers irrelevant. Readers who are drawn to this book by the appearance of AI in the title might be slightly disappointed, as most essays are oriented toward earlier epochs and thus the focus is on non-human animals, or on more conventional robots, rather than on twenty-first-century AI technology. Still, this highly intriguing, informative, and interdisciplinary volume with essays from historians as well as literary scholars should be of great interest and usefulness to anyone involved in German cultural studies from the Enlightenment to the present day. Written and published during the COVID-19 pandemic, the volume is a timely reminder of how technology and emotions continue to be intertwined in important and evolving ways depending on our circumstances, and of how literature and art portray and document the endlessly fascinating relationships between the human and the non-human in each era.