Why You'll Love This
Color is everywhere and yet almost no one can explain what it actually is — this book makes that mystery feel thrilling.
- Great if you want: interdisciplinary curiosity — history, art, science, and culture braided together
- The experience: leisurely and discursive — best savored one chapter at a time
- The writing: A scholar and a painter co-writing: precise ideas meet sensory, image-rich language
- Skip if: you want a single argument rather than ten wide-ranging essays
About This Book
Color is everywhere and yet somehow invisible to our thinking — we move through a world of red stop signs, blue moods, and green envy without stopping to ask why any of it means what it means. David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing do exactly that asking, tracing color through history, politics, literature, science, and art to reveal just how deeply it has shaped human experience. From the contested symbolism of revolutionary flags to the peculiar way ancient languages categorized hues, the book uncovers a subject hiding in plain sight — one that turns out to be as philosophically rich as it is visually immediate.
What makes this book genuinely rewarding is the unusual partnership behind it: a literary scholar and a working painter approaching the same ten colors from their respective vantage points, producing chapters that feel more like lively conversation than academic lecture. The prose is digressive in the best sense, following ideas wherever they lead — Homer, Picasso, The Wizard of Oz — without losing its thread. Readers who enjoy books that treat a seemingly simple subject with serious curiosity will find this one consistently surprising.