Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern

An extremely insightful and well written book. The author has a wonderful conversational, humorous style. He is able to take complex scientific topics and make them easy to understand, accessible, useful and incredibly enjoyable to read. A tremendous amount of research has gone into this book that pulls back the curtain on color history, the craziness of color science and all of the civilizations, inventors, scientists and companies that have labored to bring color to our lives. A fantastic, fun to read book, informative book.

This is my fourth book about colors, light, pigments. Others have focused on the history of different pigments or simply the science of light. This book is broader based, combining all of those yet with a good emphasis on how colors have been manifested in culture. It is an easy read in most places as the author puts some hefty science on the bottom shelf for more people to read. I found it highly educational and generally entertaining. He offers some profound thoughts in places. I was disappointed in several places where the author dwelled heavily on his interpretation of intense racism in the Chicago World’s Fair when it seems more clear that the choice to have everything white was more of an architectural design thought. Later, he thought it necessary to delve into contemporary politics, hardly relevant to his topic. He swayed from reporting of facts and what other people concluded to his own editorializing I have written to the author, suggesting that these are distractions from the subject and irrelevant to the topic. More, they will date his potentially timeless introduction to the science of color as his contemporary examples become old and his interpretations are judged in the future by others with new language and values, just as he judges people of a hundred years ago by his contemporary values. Such use of one generation’s vocabulary and values to judge others in the past is not good history. On that point, I give this excellent book a five for its content, a four for its writing.I look forward to reading more of Mr. Roger’s articles and other book.

Didn’t even realize how interesting this would be.

Good

This book takes you from the very limited colors available to cave painters through the step by step expansion into today's full range of hues, and even the use of visual effects to produce momentary unreal colors in cinema. It provides a discussion of what we know and don't know about the processing of color in the eye and brain. The book argues convincingly that humans have longed for wider ranges of colorants since the beginning even though many languages did not develop all the hue names we use today.It's a decent science-for-the-public text, but the writing is a little too flippant for my taste in spots. It also makes a too-brief and somewhat inaccurate mash-up of the development of color TV, in one case ascribing color development to a prominent developer of monochrome TV. These factors are what caused me to knock it down to four stars.