2006-03-11 - 7:35 p.m. - Mauve: How One Man Invented A Color That Changed The World, by Simon Garfield
An unfortunately aimless and dull book, so much so that the jacket seems at pains to disguise what it's actually about. You're told that the book is the story of Victorian chemist William Perkin, who invented the first commercially successful synthetic (the color mauve) and thus jump-started the world of industrial chemistry, for better or worse. A Chicago Tribune review claims that "Readers will root for [Perkin] in his battles, tear through pages to see what comes next, and cheer when he succeeds." This is a gross mischaracterization. Perkin's biography and the story of his invention is certainly a subject of the book, but he's sort of an admirably dull man, and he dies halfway through the book! Then it's chapter after tedious chapter on how Perkin has been remembered over the years, what kinds of speeches were given at the various anniversaries of his discovery, and observations from seemingly random scientists and color experts of today. The book as a whole thus feels like it was originally conceived as a New Yorker article or a talk on NPR; I imagine Garfield being green-lighted for a full book, and under deadline, just doing a Lexis-Nexis search for "mauve" and including absolutely everything that the search turned up. A real disappointment.