 [Larger view] | Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World
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| Very interesting, but I found it patchy to read | |
| The title alone was a seller for me. "How one man invented a color that changed the World". And I think Garfield really does manage to show this. William Perkins experiments with Coal Tar not only managed to show a viable use for this waste product, but it is because of him we are now able to dress in bright, unfading colours - aniline dyes. I found the first few chapters of this book the most interesting. I felt Garfield had a good story - showing Perkins role, his experiments, the difficulty finding someone to use the process, the expense of doing it and the competition from people also discovering the process. These first few chapters in themselves made the book worth the purchase, for me anyway. Unfortunately after that I found my attention wandered about. For some reason which I don't quite understand, Garfield started mixing up things by putting stuff on modern use of dyes, and quotes on Mauve all around the place. This really didn't work for me at all. I found it plain distracting actually. Also I don't think Garfield has quite the talent and touch of really good historical writers such as Dava Sobel (Longitude) and Giles Milton (Big Chief Elizabeth) and I think that may have also contributed to my losing attention later on. This book certainly has a place for those of you who enjoy reading about these small but essential bits of history which are all but forgotten in the modern age. The story is a very good one indeed. I just think it would have been much more gripping as a purely chronological history. | |
| OK | |
| Not bad - but only the first half of the book is readable. More interesting is the substory that the author didn't even catch or perhaps was ignoring - it sounds like this inventor wasn't really that critical in the development of the industry, except that once UK went to war with Germany they needed to find someone who wasn't German that they could credit with the invention of chemical dye and decided to make this guy the hero. | |
| Okay. But I really didn't get it. | |
| I really wanted to like this book. And, yes, it has a fascinating tale to tell. But there was something lacking in the writing that me entirely unable to 'get' what the writer was trying to say. It IS an interesting story about the origins of dyes, about the effect of dyes on other industries, the industrial surge of technology of the age, and so on. But I couldn't ever quite figure out what made the chemical composition about this particular mauve so unique and important, and what about it was pushing the world into the future. I'm not usually this lost when I read, so, officially, I'm blaming the author! Sorry Simon. |
