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?

Finding color in stars and light, examining the system of classification that determines survival through natural selection, studying the arrival of color in our universe, and considering it as a fulcrum for philosophy, DeSalle’s brilliant A Natural History of Color establishes that an understanding of color on many different levels is at the heart of learning about nature, neurobiology, individualism, and even a philosophy of existence. Color and a fine-tuned understanding of it are vital to understanding ourselves and our consciousness.