Rating: 
Summary: interesting but hard to read to the end
Review: Concur w/ others that this is a short story masquerading as a book. Making matters worse is a protagonist who, if he did anything other than compound chemicals, the reader gets no sense of it. Either a cleverly disguised interesting individual or yet another fantastically dull Victorian. The book is poorly organized to boot, w/ attempts at being current falling very flat. Disappointing book - not the author's best.
Rating: 
Summary: Color me disappointed.
Review: I first saw Simon Garfield's "Mauve" in Spokane. The subtitle, "How one man invented a color and changed the world," intrigued me, and I went through great pains to order it from the Spokane library system in order to take a closer look.I shouldn't have wasted my time. Garfield gets an "A" for subject matter and concept, but a "C" for lousy execution. On one hand, "Mauve" is the biography of William Perkin, a young chemistry student who accidentally discovers the ability to manufacture colors to dye materials, not just by using natural elements. Garfield trips up in this aspect of the book by including virtually every person Perkin came into contact with on the trip to making mauve a household color, which isn't very interesting to slog through. What's more, the reader is left wondering what could possibly come next when Perkin (I hope I'm not giving anything away here) dies, and there are still a significant number of pages still unturned. No real biographical details are given, save for the usual birth, marriages and children information. There's nothing to endear Perkin to us; nothing to make us think, "What a fascinating life this man had! I must keep reading so as not to miss a moment!" Perkin discovered a color the world had never seen, and ultimately changed industries all over. Other than that single intriguing fact, he did not lead the kind of life most people are anxious to read about. Which brings us to the other half of "Mauve," which is literally the biography of the color itself, how it caught on and the ensuing Beanie Baby-like craze over it in the early years, dubbed "mauve measles" by smart-alecky journalists. This is more interesting (especially the bit about Napoleon's wife kicking the mauve trend off) but, alas, it becomes lost as Garfield gets swept up in the more mundane and boring scientific bits, which are sure to thrill any diehard fan of textiles and manufacturing, but will put the rest of us to sleep. Hidden gem, however: On page 164 of "Mauve" there lies the word "polyoxybenzylmethyllenglycolanhydride," which impresses me, as it is even longer than "ethyltetrahydroanthrahydroquinone." (Hey, simple pleasures for simple people.) The most interesting part of "Mauve" comes at the end in Garfield's afterword, and it belies everything "Mauve" could have, or should have, been: "On (Garfield's) visits to Imperial College it was apparent how slender was the connection between the current batch of ambitious chemistry students and their Victorian predecessors. The future was too exciting to look back... but they wrote their thesis on blueberry iMacs, photographed their friends on one-use Kodaks, sprayed themselves with Calvin Klein and masked their headaches with aspirin. Their clothes were not all black; some of them wore blue, green, even yellow. And they walked around as if these colours were the most natural thing in the world." Too bad Garfield never lets the irony nor his wonder at the whole thing shine through. It's a glorious ending to an otherwise dull textbook wannabe.
Rating: 
Summary: Okay. But I really didn't get it.
Review: I really wanted to like this book. And, yes, it has a fascinating tale to tell. But there was something lacking in the writing that me entirely unable to 'get' what the writer was trying to say. It IS an interesting story about the origins of dyes, about the effect of dyes on other industries, the industrial surge of technology of the age, and so on. But I couldn't ever quite figure out what made the chemical composition about this particular mauve so unique and important, and what about it was pushing the world into the future. I'm not usually this lost when I read, so, officially, I'm blaming the author! Sorry Simon.
Rating: 
Summary: I loved this book
Review: I received Mauve this Christmas and loved it. It's a hybrid of a book, a primer in science, Victoriana, fashion and color. It's not so much a biography of Sir William Perkin, the man on the cover, as a history of mauve since his invention (1850s) to the present. Simon Garfield made me believe that the whole world can be seen in terms of a particular color, and he weaves in some great historical detail to support his case.
Mauve was really the first artificial dye to be made, and became the toast of London and Paris once the Empress Eugenie found that it suited her crinolines like nothing else. After mauve, any artificial dye was possible, and the world really did change. Even if it isn't your color of choice, I recommended this book as a very interesting read.
(By the way, I'm not Pat Barker the British author!)
Rating:
Summary: Not as good as the title promised.
Review: It could have been a great book. I'm always looking for good books about chemistry and chemists so I had high hopes for this one. The story of William Perkin discovering mauve as an 18-year-old student and then starting the synthetic dye industry in Britain is inspirational for chemistry students everywhere. However, the author races through the biography of Perkin in the first half of the book, barely hinting at his family or other aspects of the young man's life and personality. The second half of the book is all jumbled together: Perkin, fashion, natural dyes, World War II, malaria, etc. The author attempts to show that many different fields were affected by the synthesis of mauve from coal tar, but he really doesn't make a clear case for any of them, and the reader is left with a pile of disjointed factoids and unrelated characters. I was disappointed. It is still worth reading, for someone interested in the chemistry of color, but don't expect to be wowed.
Rating:
Summary: OK
Review: Not bad - but only the first half of the book is readable. More interesting is the substory that the author didn't even catch or perhaps was ignoring - it sounds like this inventor wasn't really that critical in the development of the industry, except that once UK went to war with Germany they needed to find someone who wasn't German that they could credit with the invention of chemical dye and decided to make this guy the hero.
Rating:
Summary: OK
Review: Not bad - but only the first half of the book is readable. More interesting is the substory that the author didn't even catch or perhaps was ignoring - it sounds like this inventor wasn't really that critical in the development of the industry, except that once UK went to war with Germany they needed to find someone who wasn't German that they could credit with the invention of chemical dye and decided to make this guy the hero.
Rating: 
Summary: Color your world
Review: Originally I was skeptical of a book about the origin of a color, but Mauve is so much more. It is the story of the creation of artificial colors, the industries that spawned from it, as well as birth of chemistry as a innovating science in the 19th century. The discoveries by William Perkins opened up what would be literally thousands of new colors over the years, as well as essential components of the perfume industry, flavorings industry and even the bleaching industry. Inspirational also because so much of this arose from literally castoff garbage - coal tar. In essence Perkins began a new wave of recycling. The heart of the story is less the discovery itself, but the ripples it set off that continue to today, leading to the "better living through chemistry." Yet it also spotlights one of the lamentably forgotten pioneers in science who through a combination of curiosity, determination, foresight and luck found value in others castoff. Though it is classified as a biography, it is more of a sweeping view of history - the actual materials on Perkin's life pre and post mauve are almost incidental to what was discovered. Garfield helps shed light on the color revolution and spotlights something that we today often take for granted. It was nice to walk away from a book and realized that I really learned something.
Rating:
Summary: Nothing purple about this prose
Review: Simon Garfield has written a fascinating book about the history of something we take utterly for granted, synthetic dyes, how they came about, and how they changed the world of invention. The book focuses on the story of William Perkin, who, as a young man accidentally invents a new kind of dye that does not fade or age the way natural dyes do. From that point on, his challenge is to find a place for his invention in society, and Garfield chronicles admirably the struggles Perkin faced and the impact his struggle had on the field of chemistry, which as a result of this new dye, changes from a field of intellectual scientific research to a field of commercial potential. Garfield's writing is engaging and absorbing, and this is a wonderfully illuminating book.
Rating:
Summary: Very interesting, but I found it patchy to read
Review: The title alone was a seller for me. "How one man invented a color that changed the World". And I think Garfield really does manage to show this. William Perkins experiments with Coal Tar not only managed to show a viable use for this waste product, but it is because of him we are now able to dress in bright, unfading colours - aniline dyes. I found the first few chapters of this book the most interesting. I felt Garfield had a good story - showing Perkins role, his experiments, the difficulty finding someone to use the process, the expense of doing it and the competition from people also discovering the process. These first few chapters in themselves made the book worth the purchase, for me anyway. Unfortunately after that I found my attention wandered about. For some reason which I don't quite understand, Garfield started mixing up things by putting stuff on modern use of dyes, and quotes on Mauve all around the place. This really didn't work for me at all. I found it plain distracting actually. Also I don't think Garfield has quite the talent and touch of really good historical writers such as Dava Sobel (Longitude) and Giles Milton (Big Chief Elizabeth) and I think that may have also contributed to my losing attention later on. This book certainly has a place for those of you who enjoy reading about these small but essential bits of history which are all but forgotten in the modern age. The story is a very good one indeed. I just think it would have been much more gripping as a purely chronological history.
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