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Publisher's summary
One of USA Today's “100 Books to Read While Stuck at Home During the Coronavirus Crisis"
The unforgettable, unknown history of colors and the vivid stories behind them.
“Beautifully written.... Full of anecdotes and fascinating research, this elegant compendium has all the answers.” (NPR, Best Books of 2017)
The Secret Lives of Color tells the unusual stories of 75 fascinating shades, dyes, and hues. From blonde to ginger, the brown that changed the way battles were fought to the white that protected against the plague, Picasso’s blue period to the charcoal on the cave walls at Lascaux, acid yellow to kelly green, and from scarlet women to imperial purple, these surprising stories run like a bright thread throughout history.
In this book, Kassia St. Clair has turned her lifelong obsession with colors and where they come from (whether Van Gogh’s chrome yellow sunflowers or punk’s fluorescent pink) into a unique study of human civilization. Across fashion and politics, art and war, the secret lives of color tell the vivid story of our culture.
“This passionate and majestic compedium will leave you bathed in the gorgeous optics of light.” (Elle)
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
Critic reviews
“Beautifully written and thoughtfully produced.... Full of anecdotes and fascinating research, this elegant compendium has all the answers.” (Nina Martyris, NPR’s Best Books of 2017)
“A kaleidoscope of charming, discursive essays.... A light and lively guide [that] offers plenty of fresh clues for the brain’s colorful calculations.” (The Economist)
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What listeners say about The Secret Lives of Color
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jason Toon
- 12-13-20
More about pigments than social history
This is fine for what it is. From the description, I was expecting more social history about the meaning and uses of color, but this leans far more heavily on the development of pigment and paint production. If you're interested in that, this is a well-written, engagingly narrated look at the subject. After listening to about half of it, though, it knew it wasn't quite what I was looking for.
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18 people found this helpful
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- Vincent
- 10-26-20
colorful
interesting... but not what I wanted i was looking for more of a color psychology book however it's more of a little known facts book about colors. breaking down each color with little trinkets of information.
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14 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 11-11-20
Helpful for painters
There is a lot of useful information for artists. Well read and enjoyable. No complaints.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Thomas B.
- 04-28-21
fantastic. will listen multiple times
so much better and engrossing than I thought it would be from the lukewarm reviews on here. I absolutely loved the history of fabric and this is a perfect companion. I'm going to buy the paper version just for the actual true representation of the colors within.
really just loved it
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7 people found this helpful
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- Josh
- 09-25-20
So Interesting
honestly one of the most interesting books I've read. the vignettes are so well written and it's a wonderful walk across a bunch of colors to study the effects of color through history.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Vaane
- 02-13-21
Entertaining and educational
So enjoyable to read and share! It’s how I started my first book club, lots of great reviews thus far!
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3 people found this helpful
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- Adam
- 08-28-21
Fascinating
Fasscinating stories of colors! Thd only difficulty with audio is not seeing the colors.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Lacy Alexander
- 04-08-21
Very educational
If color fascinates you and you like history this is a good book. Its great to listen to while working or need to multitask
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2 people found this helpful
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- Diana
- 07-20-23
Entertaining
It’s entertaining, but sometimes uninteresting. Didn’t like how it was organized in the levels of the scope of ideas.
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Overall
- Paolo Shere
- 07-09-23
Great!
Super interesting and engaging. Good to listen to. A book like this could be boring, but it's not at all.
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Overall
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From colorful 30,000-year-old threads found on the floor of a Georgian cave to the Indian calicoes that sparked the Industrial Revolution, The Golden Thread weaves an illuminating story of human ingenuity. Design journalist Kassia St. Clair guides us through the technological advancements and cultural customs that would redefine human civilization - from the fabric that allowed mankind to achieve extraordinary things (traverse the oceans and shatter athletic records) and survive in unlikely places (outer space and the South Pole).
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Excellent for those interested in textiles
- By Adeliese Baumann on 12-14-19
By: Kassia St. Clair
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Full Spectrum
- How the Science of Color Made Us Modern
- By: Adam Rogers
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Color, who knew?
- By Hawaiian 54 on 07-24-22
By: Adam Rogers
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On Color
- By: David Scott Kastan, Stephen Farthing
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 5 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Our lives are saturated by color. We live in a world of colors, and color marks our psychological and social existence. But for all color's ubiquity, we don't know much about it. Authors David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing offer a fresh and imaginative exploration of one of the most intriguing and least-understood aspects of everyday experience.
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Wow! Great.
- By Frances on 09-15-20
By: David Scott Kastan, and others
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The Fabric of Civilization
- How Textiles Made the World
- By: Virginia I. Postrel
- Narrated by: Caroline Cole
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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The story of humanity is the story of textiles - as old as civilization itself. Since the first thread was spun, the need for textiles has driven technology, business, politics, and culture. In The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel synthesizes groundbreaking research from archaeology, economics, and science to reveal a surprising history. From Minoans exporting wool colored with precious purple dye to Egypt, to Romans arrayed in costly Chinese silk, the cloth trade paved the crossroads of the ancient world.
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Pop journalism article lengthened into a book
- By Anonymous User on 02-05-22
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How to Be an Artist
- By: Jerry Saltz
- Narrated by: Jerry Saltz
- Length: 2 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Art has the power to change our lives. For many, becoming an artist is a lifelong dream. But how to make it happen? In How to Be an Artist, Jerry Saltz, one of the art world’s most celebrated and passionate voices, offers an indispensable handbook for creative people of all kinds. From the first sparks of inspiration - and how to pursue them without giving in to self-doubt - Saltz offers invaluable insight into what really matters to emerging artists: originality, persistence, a balance between knowledge and intuition, and that most precious of qualities, self-belief.
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Terrible Book Waste of Money
- By Classic on 04-22-20
By: Jerry Saltz
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Fabric
- The Hidden History of the Material World
- By: Victoria Finlay
- Narrated by: Carla Kissane
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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How is a handmade fabric helping save an ancient forest? Why is a famous fabric pattern from India best known by the name of a Scottish town? How is a Chinese dragon robe a diagram of the whole universe? What is the difference between how the Greek Fates and the Viking Norns used threads to tell our destiny? In Fabric, bestselling author Victoria Finlay spins us round the globe, weaving stories of our relationship with cloth and asking how and why people through the ages have made it, worn it, invented it, and made symbols out of it. And sometimes why they have fought for it.
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Unique + Interesting!
- By Mahima M on 07-30-23
By: Victoria Finlay
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The History of Western Art
- By: Peter Whitfield
- Narrated by: Sebastian Comberti
- Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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What is art? Why do we value images of saints, kings, goddesses, battles, landscapes or cities from eras of history utterly remote from ourselves? This history of art shows how painters, sculptors and architects have expressed the belief systems of their age: religious, political and aesthetic. From the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece, to the revolutionary years of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the artist has acted as a mirror to the ideals and conflicts of the human mind.
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A whirlwind tour of Western art
- By Adeliese Baumann on 11-18-12
By: Peter Whitfield
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Worn
- A People's History of Clothing
- By: Sofi Thanhauser
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 13 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Sofi Thanhauser brilliantly tells five stories—Linen, Cotton, Silk, Synthetics, Wool—about the clothes we wear and where they come from, illuminating our world in unexpected ways. She takes us from the opulent court of Louis XIV to the labor camps in modern-day Chinese-occupied Xinjiang. We see how textiles were once dyed with lichen, shells, bark, saffron, and beetles, displaying distinctive regional weaves and knits, and how the modern Western garment industry has refashioned our attire into the homogenous and disposable uniforms popularized by fast-fashion brands.
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Horrors of the industrial revolution Continued
- By Susan on 01-28-22
By: Sofi Thanhauser
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Art Is Life
- Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night
- By: Jerry Saltz
- Narrated by: Jerry Saltz, Mark Bramhall
- Length: 16 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Jerry Saltz is one of our most-watched writers about art and artists and a passionate champion of the importance of art in our shared cultural life. Since the 1990s he has been an indispensable cultural voice: Witty and provocative, he has attracted contemporary listeners to fine art as few critics have.
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WRONG for audio program
- By Karen Lehrer on 11-07-22
By: Jerry Saltz
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A Natural History of Color
- The Science Behind What We See and How We See It
- By: Rob DeSalle, Hans Bachor
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Over the years, color has dazzled, enhanced, and clarified the world we see. The experimental palettes of painting, the advent of the color photograph, Technicolor pictures, color printing, and so on have created a vivid and vibrant continuum. These ways of representing reality in “living color” echo our evolutionary reliance on and indeed privileging of color as a complex and vital form of consumption, classification, and creation. It’s everywhere we look, yet do we really know much of anything about it?
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This Is An Excellent Book
- By R. Martocci on 12-01-20
By: Rob DeSalle, and others
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A Perfect Red
- By: Amy Butler Greenfield
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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A Perfect Red recounts the colorful history of cochineal, a legendary red dye that was once one of the world's most precious commodities. Treasured by the ancient Mexicans, cochineal was sold in the great Aztec marketplaces, where it attracted the attention of the Spanish conquistadors in 1519. Shipped to Europe, the dye created a sensation, producing the brightest, strongest red the world had ever seen. Soon Spain's cochineal monopoly was worth a fortune. Desperate to find their own sources of the elusive dye, the English, French, Dutch, and other Europeans tried to crack the enigma of cochineal.
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History of a peculiar substance through the ages
- By Tobia on 08-17-16
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Color Secrets
- Learning the One Universal Language We Were Never Taught
- By: Michelle Lewis
- Narrated by: Michelle Lewis
- Length: 4 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Having studied color in science, behavior, nature, film, music, history, culture, religion, and healing, color psychology expert Michelle Lewis has boldly introduced a new theory in her powerful new book Color Secrets: that color is our only universal language.
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Great Book!
- By ryan maxwell on 12-16-22
By: Michelle Lewis
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Your Brain on Art
- How the Arts Transform Us
- By: Susan Magsamen, Ivy Ross
- Narrated by: Ellyn Jameson
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Many of us think of the arts as entertainment—a luxury of some kind. In Your Brain on Art, authors Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross show how activities from painting and dancing to expressive writing, architecture, and more are essential to our lives.
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Practical, even utilitarian ways of leveraging art
- By Lucy A. Pithecus on 04-07-23
By: Susan Magsamen, and others
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Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018
- By: Peter Schjeldahl, Jarrett Earnest - introduction
- Narrated by: Peter Schjeldahl
- Length: 15 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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