ROY G. BIV: An Exceedingly Surprising Book About Color

Color is all around us every day. We use it to interpret the world-red means stop, blue means water, orange means construction. But it is also written into our metaphors, of speech and thought alike: yellow means cowardice; green means envy-unless you're in Germany, where yellow means envy, and you can be “beat up green and yellow.”

Jude Stewart, a design expert and writer, digs into this rich subject with gusto. What color is the universe? We might say it's black, but astrophysicists think ...