Ingenito will be of great interest to scholars beyond Persian studies. In Beholding Beauty, Saʿdī emerges as a refreshingly complex figure whose works constitute an open framework for experimentation, akin to what Gordon Teskey, borrowing from Adorno, calls open thinking-a style of improvisational, exploratory inquiry undertaken through imaginative literature, where the shape of thought is dynamic and open-ended. 1 Ingenito shows that Saʿdī's works are not vehicles for predigested ideas or precisely defined meanings; indeed, Saʿdī has been a timeless source of wisdom precisely because of his open style of thinking. Like Saʿdī, Ingenito does not settle for easy or stable definitions. One of the book's strengths is its insistence on embracing textual, conceptual, and aesthetic ambivalences; Ingenito describes his method as "navigat[ing] through a cluster of islands without the aid of maps-an experience of the literary territory that is rhizomatic rather than cartographical" (p. 52). Running to just over five hundred pages, Ingenito's exploration of Saʿdī's terrain is by no means a quick day trip; but the frequent recurrence of interlinked conceptual signposts and the organizational clarity of the book's three parts ensures that the voyage does not flag. Ingenito writes with an ardor that kindles, spreading from page to reader; in a characteristically arresting analogy, Ingenito compares Saʿdī's poems to Rothko paintings: both are "made of delicate simplicity, balanced contrasts of mood, and gradual variations across the spectrum of sensory experience" (p. 33). Beholding Beauty is an exciting model of scholarship that dares to open itself to ambiguities, multiple possibilities, and nonlinear explorations of "the anthropological complexity of the human theater" (p. 136). Ingenito's reconstruction of Saʿdī's sacred homoeroticism, his exploration of vital affinities between literature and philosophy and theorization of lyric performativity-these interventions break ample new ground within Saʿdī scholarship and Persian studies, and will be generative for Islamic studies scholars, medievalists, and literary scholars and comparatists far and wide.