The Secret Language of Color: Science, Nature, History, Culture, Beauty of Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Violet Author: Arielle Eckstut | Language: English | ISBN:
1579129498 | Format: EPUB
The Secret Language of Color: Science, Nature, History, Culture, Beauty of Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Violet Description
In this beautiful and thorough investigation, The Secret Language of Color celebrates and illuminates the countless ways in which color colors our world.
Why is the sky blue, the grass green, a rose red? Most of us have no idea how to answer these questions, nor are we aware that color pervades nearly all aspects of life, from the subatomic realm and the natural world to human culture and psychology.
Organized into chapters that begin with a fascinating explanation of the physics and chemistry of color, The Secret Language of Color travels from outer space to Earth, from plants to animals to humans. In these chapters we learn about how and why we see color, the nature of rainbows, animals with color vision far superior and far inferior to our own, how our language influences the colors we see, and much more. Between these chapters, authors Joann Eckstut and Ariele Eckstut turn their attention to the individual hues of the visible spectrum—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet—presenting each in fascinating, in-depth detail.
Including hundreds of stunning photographs and dozens of informative, often entertaining graphics, every page is a breathtaking demonstration of color and its role in the world around us. Whether you see red, are a shrinking violet, or talk a blue streak, this is the perfect book for anyone interested in the history, science, culture, and beatuty of color in the natural and man-made world.
- Hardcover: 240 pages
- Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers (October 22, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1579129498
- ISBN-13: 978-1579129491
- Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 10.4 x 0.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Wow! What a stunning visual feast! The Secret Language of Color is an ambitious book that covers a variety of topics having to with colors including chemistry, nature, history, culture, art, people and more.
From the beginning of the book:
"Anyone who claims to be an expert on color is a liar. A true expert would have
to be fluent in physics, chemistry, astronomy, optics, neuroscience, geology,
botany, zoology, human biology, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, art history,
and cartography; and the list goes on and on. We thought we were color
experts before we wrote this book, but we were brought to our senses by the
breadth and depth of the material.
Now we like to describe ourselves as color tourists who traveled the world of
color--its jungles, deserts, cities, forests, rural villages, seas, monuments, and
museums--and made it back alive. Along the way, we collected our favorite things.
Perhaps the most important thing we learned in our travels, the thing that
explains why color is so omnipresent in our lives is this: more than 80 percent
of the activity in the neocortex (the part of our brain that deals with
everything from language to movement to problem solving) comes via our
eyes. The vast majority of information we process from the outside world is
visual. And everything we see is colored.
...Whether you see red, are a shrinking violet, are green with envy, talk a blue
streak, or are in a black mood, we hope that our book will celebrate, illuminate,
and paint a colorful picture of this amazing force of nature.
The Secret Language of Color is appropriately, a feast for the eyes. It divides itself into basic colors and categories, and provides a rich sampling of things, concepts and facts associated with that color - or colors in that field. It's a nice concept, and it is delightfully executed by 8 ? Design (though you might need a magnifying glass to read the captions). Each chapter has its own template backdrop that you first see in the table of contents, which itself is a collection of the templates with large page numbers, instead of a simple list. The chapters themselves use the template image as the bleeding edge of their pages. The text is the color of the chapter (The first chapter is rainbow gradient). Lots of colorful photos, a bunch of color illusion tests, and all kinds of factoids. The images often stretch across two pages, and the layout is festively inconsistent. Even the Acknowledgements manages to color everyone's name differently. It's a stylish overview.
You learn a bunch of things, like why stones look more colorful when wet (Light-scattering effects off the stone's surface are muted by the wet covering), where Yellow Journalism came from (The popular Yellow Kid cartoons, claimed by two major papers because of the readership it brought in), and the odd fact that cardinals and flamingos get their red/pink colors from what they eat. Change their diet, and they lose their hues.
I particularly liked the introduction, where the authors state their primary discovery: "Anyone who claims to be an expert in color is a liar," is how it begins. Color is so central so every field, every science, every art, and every being that no one can possibly have a complete handle on it.
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