From opsins to Technicolor movies, Rogers covers the colorscape with brio, dash, and crystal clearness.
The author of Proof: The Science of Booze (2014) returns with a lucid study of the physics, chemistry, and neuroscience of color and its influence on the human condition.
The natural world is bursting with seemingly endless color, writes Wired deputy editor Rogers in this sharp, often jocular look at waves and particles, fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic and electrical fields, and the electromagnetic spectrum, of which humans only experience a small visual slice. Since prehistory, we have gone about repurposing objects around us; one example is the engineering of chemicals to provide color. Those colors are picked up by the photoreceptors in our eyes and then processed. Rogers discusses how our neurophysiological and psychophysiological impressions help create our sense of the world, examining color as knowledge (discovering a good place to find food), color as commerce (desire, rarity, trade), color as semiotics, “to know how someone will see those colors once applied.” Rogers is particularly illuminating in his discussions of the history of color and our ever growing appreciation of it, from Aristotle to Arab physicists to the Chinese to the caves at Lascaux and beyond, as craft expertise blossomed into a revolution that marched in parallel with that of optics. While the author is in his element exploring the evolution of dyes and pigments, from the highly toxic to the highly opaque and bright, he is on less firm ground when approaching the “salience” of color, its “cultural and personal significance”—of course, this is understandable given that science has only begun to plumb the subject. Rogers also makes valiant attempts to discern the universality of color—“Do people who speak different languages literally see different colors?”—and through all the scientific concepts, he brings a tinder-dry humor and evident enthusiasm for the subject.
From opsins to Technicolor movies, Rogers covers the colorscape with brio, dash, and crystal clearness.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-328-51890-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.
The National Book Award winner delivers a handbook for an age in which egomania is morphing into autocracy at warp speed.
New Yorker contributor Gessen, an immigrant from what was then the Soviet Union, understands totalitarian systems, especially the ways in which, under totalitarian rule, language is degraded into meaninglessness. Today, writes the author, we are “using the language of political disagreement, judicial procedure, or partisan discussion to describe something that was crushing the system that such terminology was invented to describe.” Against that, Gessen suggests, we now have an administration for which words hold no reality, advancing the idea that “alternative facts” are fine but professing dismay when one calls them lies. The step-by-step degradation of democratic institutions that follows is a modern-day rejoinder to the fact that more than half a dozen years separated the Reichstag fire from World War II. That’s a big buffer of time in which to admit all manner of corruption, and all manner of corruption is what we’ve been seeing: Gessen reminds us about Mick Mulvaney’s accepting handsome gifts from the payday-loan industry he was supposed to regulate and Ben Carson’s attempt to stock his office with a $31,000 dining-room set. Yet corruption’s not the right word, writes the author, since Trump and company are quite open and even boastful about what used to be a matter of shame and duplicity. The real tragedy, it seems, is that they have been so successful in creating what the author calls a “new, smaller American society,” one that willfully excludes the Other. Many writers have chronicled the Trump administration’s missteps and crimes, but few as concisely as Gessen, and her book belongs on the shelf alongside Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and Amy Siskind’s The List as a record of how far we have fallen.
Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-18893-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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