Review: To the Letter

To the Letter: A Celebration of the Lost Art of Letter Writing 
by Simon Garfield

My rating: 4 of 5 stars 

This has been my at-work-to-read-at-lunch book for a long time now and I have thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It worked well in small chunks which I find novels rarely do. There were a lot of good insights into the value of letters and what makes a good letter. A few quotes illustrate this.

"Taken as a whole, what can we learn from these excitingly random collections of letters at auction houses and the slightly more ordered gatherings in anthologies? We learn that we are not alone, and that letters may leave us both larger and other than we were. These are odd nuggets of unexpected history--history in the present tense, history from its participants." (p. 200)
"... letter writing may be best described as the art of silent speech, the notion that the best letter to a friend was a 'talking letter', something that read as if you were telling it to them over tea." (p. 281)
"What I learned was that when you're making such a drastic selection, it helps to keep in mind that there's a story being implied by the letters if they're in chronological order, implied if not actually stated, and that actually keeps your mind on the straight and narrow." (p. 370, talking about culling the thousands of pages of Ted Hughes's letters for publication.)

Mixed into the book are a collection of letters from a British man serving in WWII to the woman who will become his wife. These letters make a touching story all their own and provide a good counterpoint to the scholarship of the book. What keeps this from being a 5-star book for me is that the book covers a wide variety of aspects of letter writing and some of the sections were less interesting to me than others. It is overall an excellent book and well worth reading.

This book counts toward the Postal Reading Challenge 2014.

Review: Mauve

Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World by Simon Garfield
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is about the work of William Perkin, a British chemist in the Victorian period, and how his discovery changed the world. It actually did and colored consumer goods are the least of it. The discovery by Perkin of how to synthesize mauve dye from coal tar lead to the creation of lots of other colors of synthetic dyes; to aspirin; to plastics; to chemotherapy drugs; to a drug to treat malaria (which is what he was looking for to begin with); and to chemical weapons. A clearly written and fascinating look at how things we probably use every day came to be here.

Garfield does an excellent job of explaining the chemistry aspects of the story in a way that made sense to a non-chemist. He also jumped back and forth in time quite a bit which kept the story moving and prevented it from getting bogged-down with too much dense science in any one spot. The details about Perkin's life were also very interesting, particularly his role as a religious leader in his community raised some interesting questions about how he might have felt about the implications of his discoveries, especially the weaponization of chemicals.

This book counts toward the 2013 Colorful Reading Challenge.