| Title | : | Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Format Type | : | Kindle Edition |
| Number of Pages | : | - |
| Publication | : | First published May 18, 2021 |
Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern Reviews
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This book is not for me. At first, I enjoyed the introduction of the author of how the use of colour developed throughout history. The invention of colour is a process that seems continuous. Early humans only recognised the natural colours that appear in nature, but everything began to change when humans started to mix colours and attach meanings to them. It was not the colour themselves that make humans modern, but rather the science behind it which becomes the foundation of how colours are interpreted throughout different regions and cultures.
What at first seemed interesting, suddenly became like torture. To me, the author hardly makes any point throughout the first few chapters with frequent jumping of topics. I expected to read something along the line of interpreting colours specifically in one culture or two to make an interesting case study, but it’s like the author attempts to explain a really big concept through the short space that the book provides.
The topic is highly intriguing, about how the invention of new colours is also triggered partly by how the early products that are colourised were sold commercially. Trade drives innovation, and the colour is one of those innovations. I especially like the author’s assessment of how the excavation of the Belitung shipwreck opened up a reassessment of the advanced pottery of the Tang Dynasty and the unknown trade routes between China and the Middle East during the 8th century. But it’s like we’ll need to dig in between the vastness of this book to discover interesting stories, while most of the time there might be stories about the mixing between several different chemicals to invent new colours.
I think the author is a bit indecisive, whether to discuss the social aspects of colour or its scientific aspects. It would make more sense to focus on one, as opposed to explaining both at the same time which creates confusion on my part about what is the discussion about. Maybe it will be enjoyable for those who have already been exposed to prior knowledge about colour, but in all fairness, this is too difficult for a lay reader to digest.
Thanks to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for providing the electronic advance reading copy through NetGalley. -
Breakdown:
Content: 4.0
Writing style/tone: 2.0
TLDR: If you can watch more than three episodes of Drunk History without feeling it gets progressively more cringe-worthy and less funny, you probably will be OK with the author's writing style of this book. If you don't mind when authors never really make the point of their title AND you have a passing interest in questions like "Is the blue I see the same as the blue you see?" and "Why were we fighting over whether that stupid ugly dress was blue/black or white/gold?" then you will probably like this book.
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Long version:
Science, color, history, linguistics -- should have been a lot here to like.
Reading this book reminded me of a specific psychology professor I had in college. He was an older guy with multiple PhDs who really knew his specialty. Brilliant guy, really. He had a knack for breaking down complex concepts and showing how they related to other complex concepts. Talking to him one-on-one was usually a great experience; however, his lectures were another matter.
Maybe he had a phobia of public speaking. Maybe he was bored to tears teaching the same classes every semester. Maybe he had a not-so-closeted disdain for undergraduate students. Maybe he thought his lecture style made him seem "relatable" or "cool" to his students and he desperately wanted to be cool. Maybe all of the above. I don't know. Whatever it was, it made his lectures torture to sit through. The more he tried to be funny, to use the latest slang and pop references, to be super casual by his choice of phrasing or body language, the more it was obvious the guy was mimicking something unnatural to him. Watching a 60-something guy try to use mimicry to impress a bunch of kids by how "with it" he is is just...well...annoying.
So, Roger's writing style reminds me of all that. He's got some fascinating science in this book, but he tries too hard to be simultaneously cavalier and geeky about it. I could never decide if he was going more for bored and snarky or hip and trendy. Either way, it became irritating and got in way of the information.
It certainly didn't help that the book jumped from one topic to another without any real transition to hold them together OR to make them relevant to his title. He said he was going to prove how the science of color made us modern. Later one, he seemed to propose that color played heavily in economics and global trade. But he never completes either argument, choosing instead to tell a lot of interesting stories, but ones that never really coalesce into a foundation for his premise.
I've read Roger's writing in Wired and enjoyed it. He shines in short form articles. Go look for his Wired articles on, for example, computer-brain interfaces to benefit aphasic patients, on ranked-choice voting models, on how COVID may have had a lasting impact on urban design. It's worth your time. The problem is that his "I'm the cool geek and will now nerdsplain this for you" approach, one that mostly works in his short articles didn't work for me in a 300+ page format.
I'm really hoping that Roger's other book, Proof, isn't written in this same style because I was looking forward to reading it....almost as much as I had looked forward to this one. -
I will never live a beige life; I love color. And I absolutely LOVED Adam Roger's book on the subject! Given the broadness of the subject, it was no surprise to see him covering aspects of physics, chemistry, archeology, anthropology, art history, psychology, physiology, linguistics, and many more broad areas of study.
There's a good balance of both art and science throughout the book, and the historic span ranges from the earliest cave paintings to the blue & black or white & gold dress that went viral on social media a few years ago. (And, the scientific studies generated in the wake of that episode were truly fascinating!) But as much territory as was covered, it was all pretty fascinating. The book was sprawling, but Mr. Rogers chose his material well, and also did a very nice job of structuring and organizing.
One of the things I particularly noticed was that the book wasn't especially Eurocentric, as so many things are. Many, many different cultures were explored, as befitting a universal subject. In fact, the comparison of different cultures and their use of, vision of, manufacture of, art with, and language for different colors was central. And not broadly, like "Asia" and "Africa," but referencing individual tribes. Culture is as relevant to discussions of color as physics.
And as interesting as it all was, I wouldn't have enjoyed it nearly as much in another writer's hands. Rogers writes in an engaging, conversational, and casual voice. And he has a delightful sense of humor that had me laughing aloud. He managed to deliver a tremendous amount of information, some of it scientifically dense, in a manner that wasn't merely painless, but was a pure pleasure to consume.
This is the kind of book that leaves me asking, "What else has this guy written?" Sadly, there's just one more book. Happily, it's already in my possession. It's now moved significantly up the TBR pile! -
I liked the topic and thought this would be a fun read. It turned out that it was only "fun" in very short segments. The author was all over the place on the topic of color.
The tipping point for me was the connection he was trying to make about the color white and the white society that somehow inferred some racist element here. Good grief. Does everything nowadays have to have some political overtones? We slip it in here and there, and then it just becomes part of the fabric of everyday life. How about just sticking to the topic at hand?
When he was on point, I enjoyed the historical context of how colors were made and what was available to them at the time, and how new colors were discovered and improved upon. But, this was all too infrequent. The book could have been much more concise and narrower in scope to be worth reading. -
I don’t like how this book was written. I found it boring and I myself am a pretty boring person. Don’t bother with it. Totally missed the mark. Probably doesn’t help that I expected a chapter on spectroscopy and didn’t get it. So many other directions this book could have went.
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This book was a gift from a dear friend who knows how fascinated I am with colour. The author, Adam Rogers, is a correspondent for "Wired" magazine and has researched the subject of mankind's invention of colours for over twenty years. This book doesn't concern itself with natural colour but colours created in the lab and factory. The work is scholarly but also witty and entertaining. The provided footnotes are handy and the bibliography is huge.
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This was a pretty decent and fascinating read about the science of color; the humor in the writing made it more enjoyable as well. The one flaw this book had was on the color white and relating to white society. Just because something is white it does not always have to mean something political!!! How about a cotton ball or a marshmallow instead? That was my only beef with this book.
Recommended for anyone that wants to learn about color. I would definitely read from this author again. -
For something that focuses on color theory, it's odd that two chapters are devoted to titanium white. That aside, this was a fantastic read which borders on needing a physical chemistry degree to understand.
Rogers' writing reminds me of Oliver Sacks'. Although this isn't a must-read, it's a really-should-read. -
Another excellent science book for non-scientists from the author. Adam Rogers takes several seemingly disparate topics - ceramics, the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, "The Dress" - and uses each to explore the (ever-evolving) science and thought processes behind color. It's certainly not exhaustive or rigorous; it’s more like a casual stroll through the subject.
The book’s conversational tone makes it a fun read, but it never loses its scientific foothold. The occasional bits of humor (even the very rare groaner) simply add to the enjoyment. It was a journey I was quite happy to have taken with him. -
Fascinating subject, and certainly well researched, but the writing was all over the place. The narrative was unfocused, often taking unexpected anecdotal tangents. Most of the first half of the book was spent discussing the colour white. The tone was a little too juvenile for my taste; at times the "hello there, fellow kids" meme came to mind. The author tried so hard to make the subject relatable that it paradoxically made me crave something... drier.
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A history of dye manufacturing and I really loved it Wonderful intricacies and marvelous "secrets". This one's a keeper!
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I can't even categorize this book into the right genre. No matter how much you adore colors, science and/or art, don't even bother to start It would be a waste of your time unless you like to be all over the place all at once with no organization or flow.
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Was too dry and I burned through all my library renewals without finishing
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Some great insight and dry humor make this a pretty engaging read. I’ve also read Rogers’s PROOF: THE SCIENCE OF BOOZE, which I enjoyed better.
Rogers is at his strongest in FULL SPECTRUM when he ties the color content to specific things: Pixar films and tech, the controversy around Vantablack, The Dress (yes, THAT dress), and so on.
The book starts a bit slowly for my tastes and sometimes gets lost in the weeds of color science. A glossary at the end might’ve been helpful for educated nonspecialist readers.
Overall, solid but not spectacular. -
I am fascinated by the premise of this book, but believe it would’ve been better written from a different angle. The argument for why colors make us modern is, at best, not captivating, and at worst, flimsy: the idea of ‘modern’ is taken for granted. I think questioning what we mean by ‘modern’ would have been a more interesting framework. What is modern and who decided this?
The writing itself feels choppy because Rogers bounces from story to story and topic to topic at lightning speed. The amount of information is dizzying.
The science of color and how much we have invested in color is amazing, but I’ll have to find another book to read about it. -
This book was pretty annoying. The author's only talent is the ability to make uninteresting topics even more boring than they need to be. His sentences are inelegantly long-winded and the experience of reading them quickly becomes unbearable. I regret every minute I spent reading this.
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Reading this book reminded me of the time I got a grade lowered in a college biology class for putting voice and fun into a science paper; the professor told me the facts and research were good, but this was not the appropriate tone for a scientific paper. I beg to differ -- Why can't science writing be fun and just a little silly in its presentation of what could be mistaken for boring facts?!? -- and, to my delight, it seems that Adam Rogers does as well. This book is clearly thoroughly researched. I was intrigued by so many facts -- I told my optometrist about Isaac Newton's experiments with vision by poking things into and around his eyeballs (50), I discussed the connections between lead and plumbers and the periodic table, color printers and air conditioning with my kids (65, 75), I marveled at the connection between portable tubes of paint and impressionism (94) and the experiments to find out connections between language and color and consistencies across cultures of naming colors (147), I gained insight into why the blue-green coat I classify mostly as green is consistently and annoyingly referred to as blue by others.
And even more intrigued and appreciative of the author's writing style, so much so that I soon found myself wondering where this guy lived and if there was any possibility that I might meet him and have a conversation someday. Loved his wit, playful curiosity and that he didn't shirk on writing with rich language just because it was a science tome. Even his acknowledgments were fun to read: "The book you are holding has been folded up inside me like an alien embryo for two decades, pulsing obscenely and assembling itself from the weirdest and most complicated tidbits of information, biding its time before uncoiling for a dramatic emergence."
Rogers' premise is that "Like the mind-bendingly fast oscillations between electricity and magnetism taht compose light itself, the oscillation between seeing and learning is a steady hum in the background of human history....Between the world of everything outside your skull and the thoughtful aspic inside it are sensors, biological marvels studding the outside of your body that, in ways both understood and not so much, take input from that outside world of subatomic particles and turn it into impulses that your think-meat can use to create a sensible impression of the world." (xvi-xvii) -
Just finished reading "Full Spectrum: How The Science of Color Made Us Modern" by Adam Rogers, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books.
As frequent readers of my reviews here on Facebook, Goodreads, and other Social Media outlets know, I automatically deduct two points on a review when a book, movie, audio play, or other form of entertainment goes Woke. Which is a pity, because Rogers wrote an excellent book about how advances in the manufacturing of natural and artificial colors impacted the development and grown of modern culture and society - even leading to some rather interesting industrial espionage cases.
Instead for some reason Rogers decides to devote a few sentences to how Sir Isaac Newton is a typical evil White man who used a prism to break down the true nature of light and received credit for it when the real credit should have gone to the Arab philosophers who came up with the theory of light being actually composed of different colors a few centuries before, but didn't provide the actual proof like Newton did. Then he goes on to cover Newton's work on color and perception. I guess Rogers was under some sort of obligation to have some Woke nonsense in his book. - which is odd because Roger's is a White man chronicling the history of a White man he obviously dislikes for being a White man who is remembered in history for a discovery he made. Wokism can cause a migraine if you think about it.
Rogers wrote an excellent history of color in modern times, but he ruined it through the lens of Wokeness.
Three Stars.
https://www.amazon.com/Full-Spectrum-... -
Thank you to Goodreads and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the chance to read an early copy of this book!
This book is fascinating and wide-ranging, but wow this is definitely a science book and not something you can just breeze through. There's a lot more physics and geology than I expected, and the author makes a persuasive argument for why both are crucial to his points, but I still skimmed through some of the details, preferring sections that were more easily digestible for me as a reader, on things like history and culture.
The assortment of chapters is a little random, but it's an interesting adventure throughout the world of color, from cave paintings to cutting-edge movie screens. I also enjoyed that the author breaks up the often-challenging subject matter with the occasional aside to lighten it up. Overall I liked the book, but I don't exactly have a good takeaway besides "color is crazy, it's all in our heads and we all see different things and it's just electromagnetic radiation, but at the same time it kind of makes the world go round." Also, this book would be good for curious readers with more of a scientific background-- even though the author attempts to break things down, I had to stop and really stew on the paragraphs about things like electricity for embarrassingly long times! -
A Rainbow Of Possibilities. This isn't the book about vision I thought it was when I originally picked it up (admittedly without even reading the description, the title alone was intriguing enough). This is instead a book about the history and current science of dye manufacturing and how it is both one of the most ancient of technologies humans have known and one of the most groundbreaking. As it turns out, my own area - Jacksonville, FL - plays a role in the narrative, being a large source of the most technologically advanced white dye currently known. Yes, at times the book gets a bit... winding... and it can seem like we have diverged into other topics altogether, but the author always winds up coming back to the central thesis after these jaunts through various bits of history. Truly a fascinating read about a history many don't know and a topic many might find a bit mundane - which is exactly what makes the work so awesome, particularly combined with the author's great timing with comedic levity. Very much recommended.
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Years ago, I tried my hand at art and became fascinated with various color wheels. I began to wonder about pigments, and how how they were created. I was captivated by the beautiful work of Maxfield Parrish, and experimented with acrylics, especially phthalocyanine blue. Then, was led to study the physics of colored light.
So, when I got a chance to read Adam Rogers new book, Full Spectrum, I was fascinated to read his account of the history of colors, pigments, and color science.
For anyone who has any curiosity about how colors became so important, as well as how they are made and how they got from place to place in the world, I can highly recommend Mr. Rogers thorough and intelligent account.
I can't imagine how anyone could read Full Spectrum without learning something interesting and worthwhile!
Strongly recommended! -
This book coffers an examination of the links between color as a physical phenomenon and color as a perception.
This book skims the surface of several different theories of what color does and how it works, but the author sacrifices depth for an attempt to encompass what is an impossibly expansive subject.
And, this might be my personal preference, the book is written in a conversational style that, while likely not an intentional effect, feels condescending. Other times it feels like an an out-of-touch dad speaking to younger people. The colloquial style seems forced. It detracts from the subject.
Once again: this is my preference.
Other than these issues, if you’re looking for a quick pop-sci read, this one is decent. Good enough. -
I wanted to love this but I did not for several reasons. One, the early part of the book focuses on history that is mostly. familiar. Rogers tries to reframe it to give credit where credit is due but it feels more like a tip of the hat and then he leans back into the establishment. Two, this deals a lot with style and design. Not in my wheelhouse. Three, the writing is uneven. Sometimes it's pithy and smart. Sometimes it's like an oversized book report that a tenth grader copy/pasted from the internet. I do love the subject matter though and he did use the word "umwelt," which I adore.
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I just reviewed Full Spectrum by Adam Rogers. #FullSpectrum #NetGalley
The category of "non fiction about mundane stuff" is certainly one of my favorites. Adam Rogers is an author with comedic tendencies, so his writing about color is mostly informative but also funny at times. Some chapters seem a little drawn out, so reading feels like driving on a highway, wondering when the next exit comes. But outside of that, quite enjoyable. -
This book combines history and science in a walk through the technological discoveries that led to color reproduction in the modern world. It also talks about how color is perceived in the human brain, and how color perception can vary from one person to another. The subject matter is interesting, and the story is told in an easy-to-read, conversational style.
Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.
