"Highly readable. . . . A fascinating and thoughtful book."-Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times

In this wide-ranging and provocative study, Tom Lutz looks at the ways people have understood weeping from the earliest known representations of tears in the fourteenth century B.C. to the tears found in today's films. Drawing on works of literature, philosophy, art, and science from the writings of Plato and Darwin to the paintings of Picasso to modern medical journals, he unearths the multiple meanings and uses of tears.