Cochineal

"All the livid streets of the Apocalypse have stormed through my life-revolution and famine, inflation and terror, epidemics and emigration. I have seen the great mass ideologies grow and spread before my eyes….and above all else that arch-plague nationalism which has poisoned the flower of our European culture.
I was forced to be defenseless, helpless witness to the most inconceivable decline of humanity into a barbarism which we have believed long since forgotten, with its deliberate and programmatic dogma of anti-humanitarianism." Stefan Zweig World of Yesterday



Last night I finished reading Victoria Finlay's Color: A Natural History of the Palette.

Here's my very short review.

It’s a pretty good book if you like to learn things and travel vicariously. An I don't mean that flippantly. Each chapter is dedicated to a color, or in the case of the black/ brown chapter which is focused on the two.
What I liked most about this book is how Finlay bounces her narrative from the stories of the past to her present travels and research. She steps in cow poo in India, goes snail hunting in Mexico then crashes a Mixtec wedding and travels within post 9/11 Afghanistan. Interspersed throughout her adventure accounts are stories of historical figures: Napoleon, George Washington and French naturalist, Thiery de Menonville.
Its an accessible read, with plenty of science and facts thrown in to make it credible, yet it doesn't simplify it's subject.
Here are some other reviews:
http://etude.uoregon.edu/spring2003/books/color.html
http://www.curledup.com/color.htm