The Secondary Colors: Three Essays - Softcover

Alexander Theroux has taught at Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the University of Virginia.

Written in the same style as The Primary Colors (LJ 8/94), this volume contains three lengthy essays?one per color?featuring the complementary hues. Reflecting Theroux's wide-ranging intellectual, cultural, and popular interests, the essays attempt to elicit tones of orange, purple, and green using snippets of poetry and literature, foreign-language words and phrases, and references to symbols, food, films, sports, cosmetics, artworks, the environment, and everyday objects. Thus, orange is loud, rhymes with nothing in English, is marmalade, Halloween, Wheaties boxes, a side effect of hepatitis, Agent Orange, and fire; purple "is the irresistibly deep and beckoning color of leather, heather, feathers, sagebrush, winter slush, Tibetan mush, age, sage, shade, grapeade, a forest glade, mince pies, winter skies..."; and green is nature, monsters, renewal, slime, poison, envy, the Grinch, and the Jolly Green Giant. These are merely verbose, rambling lists that fail in their purpose. An optional purchase.?Joan Levin, MLS, Chicago
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