Reviews for Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World

The average rating for Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-01-16 00:00:00 James Maxey I have a confession to make - I work for a chemical company (not making dyes though), and used to be an engineer in a former existence, so I understood a fair amount of what this book says about chemistry. BUT, it's a great narrative of how one small moment in time, a mistake, an error, happened to completely revolutionize our lives today. The chemical industry gets a bad wrap these days, sometimes fairly (chemical companies have done some pretty stupid/heinous things) and sometimes unfairly (trust me, life would be COMPLETELY different and much, much more difficult and dangerous without the chemicals we all use today perfectly safely), but this book actually tells the story of how the chemical industry developed (but in a non-tedious way), and how it was driven and why, and about some of the incredibly smart men who created some pretty amazing stuff in a wide range of fields. Incidentally, this book gives some of the best insights into the Victorian age, and what motivated great Victorians. It really lets you feel how Victorians thought they could change the world (and actually did), and how that realization came to a crashing halt with increasing German aggression. It touches on nationalism (Germany believed in it, England believed it but almost too late to save itself). It touches on women's increasing independence and their spending power (their whims for a color drove the creation of a completely new industry), and the increasing spending power of the middle and working classes, and how they sought to use their money to improve the quality of their lives through increased color. It touches on the inception of environmental regulation (even then, you couldn't get away with killing your neighbors for long), and made me think with some cynicism of the "new" sustainability and "eco" movements. These are not new at all, but rather standing on the shoulders of those who have come before them in creating the synthetic versions of "natural" products. I think maybe the author missed that the modern chemical industry is not a matter of synthetic versus natural - there is much to be said for both, and chemical companies understand this, but this book was written a few years before the sustainability movement really took off. Best of all though, this is a story of a very bright, curious young man, who whilst seeking a synthetic source for the treatment of malaria, which would have saved millions of lives, stumbled upon something, which, whilst appearing nothing more than frippery, actually ending up providing the chemical stepping stones to some of the most valuable substances we use today, including medicines. He was a man of great humility, great persistence (against much snobbery from his purist chemistry pals, he scaled up his laboratory error into a factory) and ultimately just a man. He is not well-remembered, but maybe he'd prefer it that way? 4 stars. Great read.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-05-09 00:00:00 peng tan I am glad that Garfield wrote this book because I don't think I would otherwise have learned about the history and significance of synthetic dyes. However, this book seemed to be more a collection of facts than a narrative. I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me that Mauve contains the author's notes, which he planned to flesh out to create a coherent story, but then he ran out of time. In many instances, I wasn't sure what to make of the facts presented. Example One: Garfield says that Perkin married his first cousin. Period. Did that make him a weird guy, or was this the type of marriage the norm in nineteenth century England? I have no idea. I also don't know how the union came to be: Were the Perkins madly in love? Did their parents (and aunts and uncles) approve? etc. Example Two: "In movies that word (mauve) has been used imaginatively. In Bruce Robinson's screenplay for Withnail and I, the lecherous Uncle Monty defines Withnail with the disparaging phrase, He's so mauve.'" Since I've never seen this movie, I have no idea what kind of character Withnail is, and therefore don't know what mauve is meant to convey about Withnail. Does it have anything to do with Uncle Monty's lechery? Since Garfield has given no sense of how the word was used in this film, I'm forced to simply accept that it was used "imaginatively." Also, I'm left to wonder whether this paragraph added meaning to the book. The best part of this book was seeing so many unfamiliar, beautiful words that are the names of colors. Apparently there are 7,500 unique color names. I'm going to try to get a hold of the full list!