On This Page
Description
Alexander Theroux, with these essays on the secondary colors - orange, purple, and green - continues to explore by way of literature, music, art, poetry, linguistics, sports, religion, food, science, botany, movies, fable, anecdote, and no end of satire and strong opinion the innumerable facets of each color, which, like the magic of his writing, scintillate like perfect diamonds. A new and avidly awaited collection, The Secondary Colors is an exposition of marvels that follows his witty, show more encyclopedic, and endlessly fascinating book on the primary colors. In the perfection of its language, looping the factual to the fabulous, this dazzling work, at once a meditation and a mythic celebration, madly delights in the information on which it also depends, like a duck drinking the water on which it also floats. Theroux is scholar and showman both, uncannily able to teach and to please in a prose so striking and of such measureless intensity and wayward poetic enchantment that every page, transfigured with a singing grace, reflects the bounty of riches gathered from a thousand fronts to make each color live, in the very same way, according to the proverb born of an old belief: It takes an entire village to raise a child. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
Alexander Theroux details how the three secondary colors, orange, purple, green, can be perceived, how they are used in marketing and society, along with some history and etymology of the color.
Theroux does go in great detail about the color and sometimes he quotes people on what they said about it as well as books. However, he does not provide a bibliography of these quotes, making hard for the person to locate the source.
Theroux does go in great detail about the color and sometimes he quotes people on what they said about it as well as books. However, he does not provide a bibliography of these quotes, making hard for the person to locate the source.
Ratings
Members
- Recently Added By
Author Information
38+ Works 2,140 Members
Series
Work Relationships
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Secondary Colors: Three Essays
- Original publication date
- 1996
- People/Characters
- Orange (color); Purple (color); Green (color)
- Epigraph
- Colors are the deeds
and sufferings of light.
—Goethe
Aren't orange, purple and green like costumes made of felt, Munchkin colors?
—Laura Markley - Dedication
- For my dear sisters, Ann Marie and Mary
- First words
- Orange is a bold, forritsome color.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I have always felt, even at the worst of times, that if only the largeness of life could ever be overpoweringly felt, how green, how deeply green, how very deeply green it would be. And what a sign of grace.
- Blurbers
- Updike, John; Proulx, E. Annie; Davies, Robertson
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 176
- Popularity
- 185,540
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (4.11)
- Languages
- English, Spanish
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 3
