"This meditative book . . . is not so much art criticism or art history as 'a written narrative accompanying a visual biography of a family.' . . .In captivating fashion, readers are invited into this uncanny space of nostalgia and loss." — Publishers Weekly
"[Dumm] makes you look beyond what the actual paintings physically represent and dig deeper to what the artist was saying in the painting. The questions about loneliness, dealing with the ghosts of our past, what can you see beyond the obvious." — Suzanne Levin, Chick with Book blog
“The principle behind My Father's House is extremely laudable in that it encourages us to get used to really looking at visual artworks in detail, to question their reasons of being, how we perceive them or simply to enjoy a visual hunting. Repeating this approach with other artworks will, over time, teach us to take the responsibility of interpreting artworks ourselves without relying on stories that curators and art historians tell us about them.” — Florence Martellini, Leonardo Reviews
"My Father's House is a genuine and rare accomplishment. Art criticism is often at its best when, rather than dissecting objects, it follows their rhythms, twists, and turns. Thomas Dumm does just that. One of this book's many strengths is the variety of ways that he evocatively relates the experience of Will Barnet's paintings. Another is the magnificent introduction, which brings Emerson, Melville, and Cavell, and others into conversation with the spirit of Barnet's work and with Barnet himself." — Tom Huhn, author of Imitation and Society: The Persistence of Mimesis in the Aesthetics of Burke, Hogarth, and Kant
"Thomas Dumm's unique intelligence, perceptual clarity and philosophical erudition inform this powerful homage to the artist Will Barnet and his series of paintings, My Father's House. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walter Benjamin and Stanley Cavell are among those summoned to assist Dumm as he meditates on questions of place and person, loss and love, past and present, conjured for him by Barnet's haunting and haunted works. This is a deeply moving account of how an encounter with art might allay the turbulent loneliness of our age." — Ann Lauterbach, author of Under the Sign
"In this beautiful book, Thomas Dumm invents a new genre of writing, neither art criticism nor memoir nor philosophy nor psychology but something drawing from each of those, something that tries to show more than describe how works of art have power, a disseminating, productive power that exceeds any biography. Dumm is an extraordinary writer and courageous thinker." — Jane Bennett, author of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things