Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern

by Adam Rogers

"Informative and entertaining...Rogers is a seasoned raconteur, unreeling an eons-spanning tale with skill." —Wall Street JournalA lively account of our age-old quest for brighter colors, which changed the way we see the world, from the best-selling author of The Science of Booze From kelly green to millennial pink, our world is graced with a richness of colors. But our human-made colors haven’t always matched nature’s kaleidoscopic array. To reach those brightest heights required millennia of remarkable innovation and a fascinating exchange of ideas between science and craft that’s allowed for the most luminous manifestations of our built and adorned world.   In Full Spectrum, Rogers takes us on that globe-trotting journey, tracing an arc from the earliest humans to our digitized, synthesized present and future. We meet our ancestors mashing charcoal in caves, Silk Road merchants competing for the best ceramics, and textile artists cracking the centuries-old mystery of how colors mix, before shooting to the modern era for high-stakes corporate espionage and the digital revolution that’s rewriting the rules of color forever.    In prose as vibrant as its subject, Rogers opens the door to Oz, sharing the liveliest events of an expansive human quest—to make a brighter, more beautiful world—and along the way, proving why he’s “one of the best science writers around.”* *National Geographic

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, History, Art, Physics, Audiobook, Psychology

420 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 18, 2021

Reviews

[Bagus · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is not for me. At first, I enjoyed the introduction of the author of how the use of colour developed throughout history. The invention of colour is a process that seems continuous. Early humans only recognised the natural colours that appear in nature, but everything began to change when humans started to mix colours and attach meanings to them. It was not the colour themselves that make humans modern, but rather the science behind it which becomes the foundation of how colours are interpreted throughout different regions and cultures.

What at first seemed interesting, suddenly became like torture. To me, the author hardly makes any point throughout the first few chapters with frequent jumping of topics. I expected to read something along the line of interpreting colours specifically in one culture or two to make an interesting case study, but it’s like the author attempts to explain a really big concept through the short space that the book provides.

The topic is highly intriguing, about how the invention of new colours is also triggered partly by how the early products that are colourised were sold commercially. Trade drives innovation, and the colour is one of those innovations. I especially like the author’s assessment of how the excavation of the Belitung shipwreck opened up a reassessment of the advanced pottery of the Tang Dynasty and the unknown trade routes between China and the Middle East during the 8th century. But it’s like we’ll need to dig in between the vastness of this book to discover interesting stories, while most of the time there might be stories about the mixing between several different chemicals to invent new colours.

I think the author is a bit indecisive, whether to discuss the social aspects of colour or its scientific aspects. It would make more sense to focus on one, as opposed to explaining both at the same time which creates confusion on my part about what is the discussion about. Maybe it will be enjoyable for those who have already been exposed to prior knowledge about colour, but in all fairness, this is too difficult for a lay reader to digest.

Thanks to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for providing the electronic advance reading copy through NetGalley.

[Yaaresse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Breakdown:
Content: 4.0
Writing style/tone: 2.0

TLDR: If you can watch more than three episodes of Drunk History without feeling it gets progressively more cringe-worthy and less funny, you probably will be OK with the author's writing style of this book. If you don't mind when authors never really make the point of their title AND you have a passing interest in questions like "Is the blue I see the same as the blue you see?" and "Why were we fighting over whether that stupid ugly dress was blue/black or white/gold?" then you will probably like this book.
__________
Long version:
Science, color, history, linguistics -- should have been a lot here to like.

Reading this book reminded me of a specific psychology professor I had in college. He was an older guy with multiple PhDs who really knew his specialty. Brilliant guy, really. He had a knack for breaking down complex concepts and showing how they related to other complex concepts. Talking to him one-on-one was usually a great experience; however, his lectures were another matter.

Maybe he had a phobia of public speaking. Maybe he was bored to tears teaching the same classes every semester. Maybe he had a not-so-closeted disdain for undergraduate students. Maybe he thought his lecture style made him seem "relatable" or "cool" to his students and he desperately wanted to be cool. Maybe all of the above. I don't know. Whatever it was, it made his lectures torture to sit through. The more he tried to be funny, to use the latest slang and pop references, to be super casual by his choice of phrasing or body language, the more it was obvious the guy was mimicking something unnatural to him. Watching a 60-something guy try to use mimicry to impress a bunch of kids by how "with it" he is is just...well...annoying.

So, Roger's writing style reminds me of all that. He's got some fascinating science in this book, but he tries too hard to be simultaneously cavalier and geeky about it. I could never decide if he was going more for bored and snarky or hip and trendy. Either way, it became irritating and got in way of the information.

It certainly didn't help that the book jumped from one topic to another without any real transition to hold them together OR to make them relevant to his title. He said he was going to prove how the science of color made us modern. Later one, he seemed to propose that color played heavily in economics and global trade. But he never completes either argument, choosing instead to tell a lot of interesting stories, but ones that never really coalesce into a foundation for his premise.

I've read Roger's writing in Wired and enjoyed it. He shines in short form articles. Go look for his Wired articles on, for example, computer-brain interfaces to benefit aphasic patients, on ranked-choice voting models, on how COVID may have had a lasting impact on urban design. It's worth your time. The problem is that his "I'm the cool geek and will now nerdsplain this for you" approach, one that mostly works in his short articles didn't work for me in a 300+ page format.

I'm really hoping that Roger's other book, Proof, isn't written in this same style because I was looking forward to reading it....almost as much as I had looked forward to this one.

[Susan Tunis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will never live a beige life; I love color. And I absolutely LOVED Adam Roger's book on the subject! Given the broadness of the subject, it was no surprise to see him covering aspects of physics, chemistry, archeology, anthropology, art history, psychology, physiology, linguistics, and many more broad areas of study.

There's a good balance of both art and science throughout the book, and the historic span ranges from the earliest cave paintings to the blue & black or white & gold dress that went viral on social media a few years ago. (And, the scientific studies generated in the wake of that episode were truly fascinating!) But as much territory as was covered, it was all pretty fascinating. The book was sprawling, but Mr. Rogers chose his material well, and also did a very nice job of structuring and organizing.

One of the things I particularly noticed was that the book wasn't especially Eurocentric, as so many things are. Many, many different cultures were explored, as befitting a universal subject. In fact, the comparison of different cultures and their use of, vision of, manufacture of, art with, and language for different colors was central. And not broadly, like "Asia" and "Africa," but referencing individual tribes. Culture is as relevant to discussions of color as physics.

And as interesting as it all was, I wouldn't have enjoyed it nearly as much in another writer's hands. Rogers writes in an engaging, conversational, and casual voice. And he has a delightful sense of humor that had me laughing aloud. He managed to deliver a tremendous amount of information, some of it scientifically dense, in a manner that wasn't merely painless, but was a pure pleasure to consume.

This is the kind of book that leaves me asking, "What else has this guy written?" Sadly, there's just one more book. Happily, it's already in my possession. It's now moved significantly up the TBR pile!

[Jon Larson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the topic and thought this would be a fun read. It turned out that it was only "fun" in very short segments. The author was all over the place on the topic of color.

The tipping point for me was the connection he was trying to make about the color white and the white society that somehow inferred some racist element here. Good grief. Does everything nowadays have to have some political overtones? We slip it in here and there, and then it just becomes part of the fabric of everyday life. How about just sticking to the topic at hand?

When he was on point, I enjoyed the historical context of how colors were made and what was available to them at the time, and how new colors were discovered and improved upon. But, this was all too infrequent. The book could have been much more concise and narrower in scope to be worth reading.

[E · Rating 3 out of 5]

Adam Rogers' work explores how mankind has developed the art and science of pigmentation. He also discusses how we actually process color and light in our eyes and brains. When he started writing about how Pixar makes versions of its movies for the sort of high-tech theaters that don't even exist yet, my mind was more or less blown.

You'd think a writer could keep politics out of a book like this. But no. The color black has to be compared to the heart of a GOP ex-president. A writer from a century ago has to be labeled "racist" because he called uncivilized tribes, well, "uncivilized." And on and on. The pieties sure got old.

[Erik Molnar · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t like how this book was written. I found it boring and I myself am a pretty boring person. Don’t bother with it. Totally missed the mark. Probably doesn’t help that I expected a chapter on spectroscopy and didn’t get it. So many other directions this book could have went.

[Elton · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF

Misleading writing. Pushed narrative. Very little focus on color itself, even the history, and more focus on what the author thinks (plus his own unnecessary stories that add nothing to the content).

Disappointing mess.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a gift from a dear friend who knows how fascinated I am with colour. The author, Adam Rogers, is a correspondent for "Wired" magazine and has researched the subject of mankind's invention of colours for over twenty years. This book doesn't concern itself with natural colour but colours created in the lab and factory. The work is scholarly but also witty and entertaining. The provided footnotes are handy and the bibliography is huge.

[Lisa Konet · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a pretty decent and fascinating read about the science of color; the humor in the writing made it more enjoyable as well. The one flaw this book had was on the color white and relating to white society. Just because something is white it does not always have to mean something political!!! How about a cotton ball or a marshmallow instead? That was my only beef with this book.

Recommended for anyone that wants to learn about color. I would definitely read from this author again.

[Judy Aulik · Rating 5 out of 5]

For something that focuses on color theory, it's odd that two chapters are devoted to titanium white. That aside, this was a fantastic read which borders on needing a physical chemistry degree to understand.
Rogers' writing reminds me of Oliver Sacks'. Although this isn't a must-read, it's a really-should-read.

[LexIconDevil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another excellent science book for non-scientists from the author. Adam Rogers takes several seemingly disparate topics - ceramics, the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, "The Dress" - and uses each to explore the (ever-evolving) science and thought processes behind color. It's certainly not exhaustive or rigorous; it’s more like a casual stroll through the subject.

The book’s conversational tone makes it a fun read, but it never loses its scientific foothold. The occasional bits of humor (even the very rare groaner) simply add to the enjoyment. It was a journey I was quite happy to have taken with him.

[cooldash · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating subject, and certainly well researched, but the writing was all over the place. The narrative was unfocused, often taking unexpected anecdotal tangents. Most of the first half of the book was spent discussing the colour white. The tone was a little too juvenile for my taste; at times the "hello there, fellow kids" meme came to mind. The author tried so hard to make the subject relatable that it paradoxically made me crave something... drier.

[Jacob Olshansky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some very interesting little stories about the science and history of color. The stories had a tendency to meander, making it hard to identify the main lessons. It was also hard to discern any narrative arc throughout the book. Nonetheless, I really did gain a new appreciation for color!
As a scientist, I respect the attempts to concisely explain photophysics for a broad audience. However, I suspect that these explanations were too brief to be of use to non-experts, and too far from fact to be appreciated by experts.

[Andrea Stoeckel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A history of dye manufacturing and I really loved it Wonderful intricacies and marvelous "secrets". This one's a keeper!

[Sougeitu · Rating 4 out of 5]

確實跟有些書評說的一樣，邏輯轉換不夠恰當，有點東扯西扯的意思，但內容的部分還是很有趣的。

[Lars · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fun whimsical writing about fascination science and neurology of color. Don’t expect a linear structure. Go with the flow. Almost a love letter to titanium dioxide.

[Karen Ng · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can't even categorize this book into the right genre. No matter how much you adore colors, science and/or art, don't even bother to start It would be a waste of your time unless you like to be all over the place all at once with no organization or flow.

[Marcy]

Was too dry and I burned through all my library renewals without finishing

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Local area man checked out audiobook from library and got halfway through before realizing he'd bought a copy on Google Books only three months before. However, I think this is going to work out. Spectrum is jam packed with fascinating info, especially for someone with deuteranomaly like myself. This is one of the relatively rare books that I would consider consuming twice.

[Joe Fruscione · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some great insight and dry humor make this a pretty engaging read. I’ve also read Rogers’s PROOF: THE SCIENCE OF BOOZE, which I enjoyed better.

Rogers is at his strongest in FULL SPECTRUM when he ties the color content to specific things: Pixar films and tech, the controversy around Vantablack, The Dress (yes, THAT dress), and so on.

The book starts a bit slowly for my tastes and sometimes gets lost in the weeds of color science. A glossary at the end might’ve been helpful for educated nonspecialist readers.

Overall, solid but not spectacular.

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am fascinated by the premise of this book, but believe it would’ve been better written from a different angle. The argument for why colors make us modern is, at best, not captivating, and at worst, flimsy: the idea of ‘modern’ is taken for granted. I think questioning what we mean by ‘modern’ would have been a more interesting framework. What is modern and who decided this?
The writing itself feels choppy because Rogers bounces from story to story and topic to topic at lightning speed. The amount of information is dizzying.
The science of color and how much we have invested in color is amazing, but I’ll have to find another book to read about it.

[Loraine · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was pretty annoying. The author's only talent is the ability to make uninteresting topics even more boring than they need to be. His sentences are inelegantly long-winded and the experience of reading them quickly becomes unbearable. I regret every minute I spent reading this.

[Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just finished reading "Full Spectrum: How The Science of Color Made Us Modern" by Adam Rogers, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books.
As frequent readers of my reviews here on Facebook, Goodreads, and other Social Media outlets know, I automatically deduct two points on a review when a book, movie, audio play, or other form of entertainment goes Woke. Which is a pity, because Rogers wrote an excellent book about how advances in the manufacturing of natural and artificial colors impacted the development and grown of modern culture and society - even leading to some rather interesting industrial espionage cases.
Instead for some reason Rogers decides to devote a few sentences to how Sir Isaac Newton is a typical evil White man who used a prism to break down the true nature of light and received credit for it when the real credit should have gone to the Arab philosophers who came up with the theory of light being actually composed of different colors a few centuries before, but didn't provide the actual proof like Newton did. Then he goes on to cover Newton's work on color and perception. I guess Rogers was under some sort of obligation to have some Woke nonsense in his book. - which is odd because Roger's is a White man chronicling the history of a White man he obviously dislikes for being a White man who is remembered in history for a discovery he made. Wokism can cause a migraine if you think about it.
Rogers wrote an excellent history of color in modern times, but he ruined it through the lens of Wokeness.
Three Stars.






https://www.amazon.com/Full-Spectrum-...

[Yofish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe more like 4.25 stars

An odd idea for a book, but he’s a good writer, knows his stuff, and it worked well.

It’s kind of about the history of color, mostly how different pigments (in paint, say) were invented. But also about the way that science has interpreted and understood color.

He made an interesting point that I hadn’t thought about: we have the story about how Aristotle got it (the science of color) wrong and it took Newton to get it right. But Newton had an extra 2000 years of technology to work with. We don’t usually think of things advancing that much in that particular 2000 years---indeed there’s been much more advance in the 350 years since---but it wasn’t nothing.

There are two chapters at the end on the Blue Dress and Vantablack, which don’t quite fit in with the rest, but are so obviously things that need to be discussed if you’re writing any sort of book on color in the 21st century. I knew some about those, but learned a lot more here.

The writing was fairly informal in style, but that worked well for me.

There were a couple of those color insert pages in the version of the book I read---there probably could have been more, given that they were the only actual colors in the book, and that was really the point of the book. (Also, weirdly, because of endnotes and bibliography and whatnot, they didn’t show up until ¾ of the way through the actual prose.)

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to Goodreads and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the chance to read an early copy of this book!

This book is fascinating and wide-ranging, but wow this is definitely a science book and not something you can just breeze through. There's a lot more physics and geology than I expected, and the author makes a persuasive argument for why both are crucial to his points, but I still skimmed through some of the details, preferring sections that were more easily digestible for me as a reader, on things like history and culture.

The assortment of chapters is a little random, but it's an interesting adventure throughout the world of color, from cave paintings to cutting-edge movie screens. I also enjoyed that the author breaks up the often-challenging subject matter with the occasional aside to lighten it up. Overall I liked the book, but I don't exactly have a good takeaway besides "color is crazy, it's all in our heads and we all see different things and it's just electromagnetic radiation, but at the same time it kind of makes the world go round." Also, this book would be good for curious readers with more of a scientific background-- even though the author attempts to break things down, I had to stop and really stew on the paragraphs about things like electricity for embarrassingly long times!

[Nathan Huttash · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the book, it talks about how the colors have evolved over time, and how different factors affect how we see color. For instance, different people see color differently, and different lights affect what a color may look like. What I liked about this is how the history and science of what the author was talking about always tied together to make a sort of story line. It was easy to follow from one topic to the next. What I did not like was the fact that there were so many points and facts to keep track of, and I was quickly overwhelmed with the facts. For others reading this, I would suggest taking it in little bits at a time to digest all the information. That isn't to say the information is bad though, in fact quite the opposite. My favorite was learning that the eye doesn't necessarily need to 'see' all the colors, it only needs to see three. These are the three primary colors, and it turns out your eye can mix them together to show your brain what color it is seeing. I also learned there's a 3-D version of the color spectrum, which was very cool to see. Overall, this was a very fun and interesting read, and I would suggest it for anyone into the why behind how things work.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Rainbow Of Possibilities. This isn't the book about vision I thought it was when I originally picked it up (admittedly without even reading the description, the title alone was intriguing enough). This is instead a book about the history and current science of dye manufacturing and how it is both one of the most ancient of technologies humans have known and one of the most groundbreaking. As it turns out, my own area - Jacksonville, FL - plays a role in the narrative, being a large source of the most technologically advanced white dye currently known. Yes, at times the book gets a bit... winding... and it can seem like we have diverged into other topics altogether, but the author always winds up coming back to the central thesis after these jaunts through various bits of history. Truly a fascinating read about a history many don't know and a topic many might find a bit mundane - which is exactly what makes the work so awesome, particularly combined with the author's great timing with comedic levity. Very much recommended.

[Valerie Stubberfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

I checked this book out of my library after picking it up out of curiosity in a Barnes & Noble during the holiday rush back in December of 2021 and, due to ADHD, school, and vision issues, I read it at an abysmally slow pace and renewed it a total of 4 times. This is by no means a fault of the author. I really enjoyed everything about the book and wanted to give it the attention that it deserved because of how interesting I found it. Not only is it educational from both a historical and scientific perspective, Rogers is witty and peppers a good amount of character and humor throughout that helped keep my hamster brain entertained. I highly recommend this to anyone that is interested in reading about how we, as a species, have tried to understand and conceptualize color, as well as see a glimpse of what's yet to come. (I thoroughly enjoyed trying to visualize everything that Rogers wrote about and I have to compliment him on his writing style. I really want to go to a museum and look at some ancient pottery, like now.)

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here is a book that is part history, part science, blended to eventually reach a point that it is all in your head. Color, that is. I like books that take a view of history through a lens of a single topic, as this highlights the lesser known interactions that make the world as it is today.

Color is like sound, in that each person has a slightly different interpretation of the sense. The author takes us through the use of color in civilization, with the original colors used for art. It is fascinating to learn about how old civilizations may not have had words for colors that we use today. It wasn’t that they couldn’t see them, more a matter of did they need to care. It is like a tribe whose counting is one, two, many.

The author’s writing style make for a lot of laughs. For what could have been a dry discussion of brains and color, it is a fun romp through history. He raises awareness that just because you see a color doesn’t mean others see it the same way.

[John Tobler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Years ago, I tried my hand at art and became fascinated with various color wheels. I began to wonder about pigments, and how how they were created. I was captivated by the beautiful work of Maxfield Parrish, and experimented with acrylics, especially phthalocyanine blue. Then, was led to study the physics of colored light.

So, when I got a chance to read Adam Rogers new book, Full Spectrum, I was fascinated to read his account of the history of colors, pigments, and color science.

For anyone who has any curiosity about how colors became so important, as well as how they are made and how they got from place to place in the world, I can highly recommend Mr. Rogers thorough and intelligent account.

I can't imagine how anyone could read Full Spectrum without learning something interesting and worthwhile!

Strongly recommended!