Showing posts with label Rob DeSalle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rob DeSalle. Show all posts

Monday, May 3, 2021

A Natural History of Color by Hans Bachor, Rob DeSalle

Rating: WARTY!

The idiot librarians at Goodreads have this author listed as Bacher and Bachor. Way to go! It's yet another reason to ditch Amazon and all its works. Evidently there's no respect for writers in those quarters, only for profits. This audiobook was read nicely by George Newbern, but ultimately it was disappointing for me. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting from it, but what I got was less than that, whatever it was! The biggest problem for me was that the book was far more dense and technical than I expected. I did not expect an academic paper and to be fair, that's not what this was, but in many ways it was annoyingly close at times.

If I'd been sitting comfortably with no distractions I could have followed it a lot better, but I would still have had a problem with the density of the technical stuff. A book like that, if I'm going to read it, I need to have in front of me as a print, or ebook. Audiobooks do not work well for me that way. The fact that this book went off on tangents meandering as far back as the Big Bang and later off into evolutionary genetics did not help. While I would not have minded brief excursions in either direction, these things just went into far too much technical detail, and were much too long.

There was a huge amount on genetics and mutations, and on and on, and it started to feel more like a dry biology text book than one about color and color perception so I also tired of the topics. I made it through most of the book, but eventually decided my time would be better spent on a different topic, and I did not regret swapping this out for a book on relativity, which was far better written and much more educational and entertaining. I can't commend this one.