46 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ MARCH 8, 2021
Review_NONFICTION
intriguing history, but the meandering
path doesn’t really lead anywhere. (May)Full Spectrum: How the Science
of Color Made Us Modern
Adam Rogers. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28
(336p) ISBN 978-1-328-51890-3
Science writer Rogers (Proof) considers
physics, art, neuroscience, and linguistics in
this breezy and accessible survey of how
humans use, understand, and perceive color.
To prove that learning how to capture colors
“has been nothing less than the millennia-
long process of becoming a thinking species
with multiple cultures,” Rogers visits a
100,000-year-old paint shop in South
Africa’s Blomblos caves, explores Newton’s
discovery of how the refraction of light pro-
duces colors, and describes the “Pointers
gamut,” a map of all colors that can be seen
by the human eye that was created in the
1970s. Those with a scientific bent will
enjoy the author’s explanation of titanium
dioxide, the “whitest pigment on Earth,”
used in paints, paper, and ceramics, as well
as the “blackest black,” called Vantablack,
for which artist Anish Kapour has exclusive
rights to use in paint-form. There’s also a
lucid explanation of how the eyes and brain
integrate information to perceive color.
The author’s passion for his subject becomes
quickly apparent as he offers a vivid tour of
the complexities behind the everyday
experience of seeing the colors that give
“our universe shape.” With its vast range
of perspectives, there’s something in this
investigation for everyone. Agent: Eric
Lupfer, Fletcher & Co. (May)Seed to Dust: Life, Nature, and
a Country Garden
Marc Hamer. Greystone, $26.95 (416p)
ISBN 978-1-77164-768-7
Hamer (after How to Catch a Mole)
delivers a lyrical if navel-gazing memoir
of this time working as a gardener in
Wales. Describing himself as a man with
“broken nails and skin-cracked fingers”
whose “deepest relationships are not with
humans, but with wind and rain,” Hamer
lives a “sixteenth-century kind of life”
with his wife of 35 years, Peggy, and is
bewildered by his grown children’s deci-
sions to live more modern lives, leading
him to wonder, “Am I the last of the
simple ones?” In the garden, he works by
instinct and impression, and dismissesBoccaletti describes how water influenced
state infrastructures (such as the develop-
ment of Egypt’s state along the Nile), and
how ideas about water evolved into societal
norms (for example, Jewish jurisprudence
regarding water ownership stems from the
“water-scarce” Levant). In China in the
fifth and sixth centuries, he writes, Daoists
advocated for well-spaced embankments
adapted to the annual floods, while con-
flicting Confucians argued for levees to
constrain the waters “into submission.”
And Rome became “a world of small
dams, diversions, and tiny settling tanks,
all developed by private individuals.”
Boccaletti connects political troubles
throughout Europe to famines brought on
by drought, and suggests America’s expan-
sion and economic growth was due to its
natural waterways. He brings things up to
the present by discussing “modern envi-
ronmentalism,” covering climate change,
global water security, and China’s Three
Gorges Dam, the largest piece of infra-
structure in the world when it was com-
missioned in 2009. But while Boccaletti
covers a lot of ground, things never come
together into a cohesive narrative. There’s
loads of information on offer and plenty oftabloid crimes, from the newspaper wars
of the Gold Rush era, which ended in a
publisher’s homicide, to the office
building massacre in 1993 that left eight
dead from shots fired from a Tec-9 and
led to the passage of the Federal Assault
Weapons Ban in 1994. In between, he
covers such sensational crimes as the
Tong wars of the late 19th century; the
unsolved murders of the Doodler, who
preyed on gay men in 1974 and 1975;
and the 1978 shooting murders of San
Francisco mayor George Moscone and
supervisor Harvey Milk by Dan White,
who proffered the “Twinkie defense” (the
argument that eating junk food drove
him insane) and was convicted on two
counts of manslaughter. Calhoun writes
with wit and passion about the city he
loves and its bloody history. This is a
feast for true crime fans. (May)Water: A Biography
Giulio Boccaletti. Pantheon, $27.95 (400p)
ISBN 978-1-5247-4823-4
Boccaletti, chief strategic officer for the
Nature Conservancy, debuts with an infor-
mative if dry survey of “the overwhelming
power of water” and its influence on society.★ Letters to Camondo
Edmund de Waal. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28 (192p) ISBN 978-0-374-60348-9A
sumptuous household museum prompts a reverie
on the doomed French-Jewish haute bourgeoisie
in this elegiac family history. Memoirist and
ceramic artist de Waal (The Hare with the Amber
Eyes) addresses an epistolary monologue to Moïse de
Camondo (1860–1935), a Jewish banker and collector
who bequeathed to the public his palatial home in Paris,
along with its art, porcelains, and antiques, in honor of
his son, a pilot killed in WWI. De Waal’s detailed
appreciations of the Musée Nissim de Camondo’s fur-
nishings—“the panels that hold the decoration of birds
are framed in gold so that this toucan, this mistle thrush
has its own little patch of the world, a rock to sit on, a bush to sing at”—open out
into a reconstruction of the lives of Camondo’s circle of related Jewish families
(de Waal’s Ephrussi family forebears, who lived nearby, among them) who rose
to prominence as intellectuals and patrons but became targets of anti-Semitic
ideologues. (The book’s later chapters tersely recount the persecution of Moïse’s
daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren in Nazi-occupied France and their
deaths at Auschwitz.) De Waal’s elegant prose, rapt eye for aesthetics, subtle
character sketches, and nuanced musings on Jewish identity yield a rich, Proustian
recreation of a lost era. Photos. (May)