Blue cover art

Blue

In Search of Nature's Rarest Color

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Blue

By: Kai Kupferschmidt
Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
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About this listen

A globe-trotting quest to find blue in the natural world - and to understand our collective obsession with this bewitching color

Blue is a rare color - natural blue, that is. From morpho butterflies in the rain forest to the blue jay flitting past your window, vanishingly few living things are blue - and most that appear so are doing sleight of hand with physics or complex chemistry. Flowers modify the red pigment anthocyanin to achieve their blue hue. Even the blue sky above us is a trick of the light.

Yet this hard-to-spot accent color in our surroundings looms large in our affections. Science journalist Kai Kupferschmidt has been fascinated by blue since childhood. His quest to find and understand his favorite color and its hallowed place in our culture takes him to a gene-splicing laboratory in Japan, a volcanic lake in Oregon, and to Brandenburg, Germany - home of the last Spix's macaws. From deep underground where blue minerals grow into crystals to miles away in space where satellites gaze down at our "blue marble" planet, wherever we do find blue, it always has a story to tell.

©2019 Hoffman und Campe Verlag, Hamburg. English-language translation copyright by The Experiment, LLC. (P)2021 Tantor Art Nature & Ecology Outdoors & Nature Physics Science Travel Writing & Commentary

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All stars
Most relevant  
Brilliantly researched and put together. It helped me develop more appreciation for the world we can see. Amazing work!

Broad, deep, strong and delicate

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things got very blue. lot about one colour, but it's interesting light (colour pun) information. good book, especially to pass the time...or if you wanna know about blue…and, apparently, i did.
from where and how it's found in nature, to artificial pigments, and lots of other fascinating things.
good book.

violets are blue

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After initially not taking to the narrator I got past that and found it fascinatingly enjoyable .

Facts and history

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A good book and well narrated. Somehow at the end, getting into human environmental abuse and his HIV diagnosis seemed to be irrelevant to the book and the subject matter.

Very good review of the topic

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