The Secondary Colors

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, 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.