2021, Book 7: Color: a natural history of the palette, Victoria Finlay

It's all right. Travel book and popular history, and somewhat sketchy on some of the history. (E.g., Newton did not put forward the theory that light of different colours is of different wavelengths. He was entirely opposed to the wave theory of light.)

Amusing description of getting a visa to visit Afghanistan to see the lapis lazuli mines:

When the call came we were at dinner. "The Taliban have given me your visa number," Eric said down the crackly satellite line from Kabul. We reached for a pen. "The number is five," he announced grandly. It seemed ironic to have waited so long for a number we could so easily have invented.

2021, Book 6: A short history of Amsterdam, Richter Roegholt

The 17th and, especially, the 16th century maps of Amsterdam are the best part of this book.

The text required a good, or even a borderline competent, editor. The translation is bad, filled with orthographical and grammatical errors and with questionable stylistic choices. In a country filled with people perfectly fluent in English it is surprising that one can find a professional translator of such poor ability. The original Dutch text probably wasn't much better, if one is to judge by the many odd skips and repetitions. My favourite moment is on page 143:

In 1973 the Vincent van Gogh museum was opened in which the collection of Vincent van Gogh, Theo van Gogh's son was housed.

It is difficult to imagine a set of mental contortions that can plausibly lead to such a sentence. Not only is its main clause inane (no kidding, you say the work of the most famous painter of the 19th century is housed in the museum that shares his name?), and not only is the elaboration inane (Vincent is obviously far more famous than any of his relatives), but it is incorrect to boot: Theo was Vincent's younger brother. (Their father's name was Theodorus, and it never appears in the shortened form.)

2021, Book 5: Amazons: the real warrior women of the ancient world, John Man

A pleasant enough amble through history and literature with a misleading subtitle. More than half the book deals with legend rather than history, and nearly the entire remaining portion deals with recent rather than ancient history.

The nadir of the book is undoubtedly right after a mention of Maria Gaetana Agnesi's work on calculus. Man's pathetic "I will never have any idea what [infinitessimal calculus] is" displays a deplorable lack of intellectual curiosity. This sort of half-assed pride in one's own ignorance is more befitting a ditzy cheerleader on a teen sitcom than a supposed historian and serious author. It makes one wonder how much of the rest of the book Man could not be bothered to research, because, gosh, this whole history thing is kinda tricky, and literature sure requires a lot of reading. A few pages later Man appears to either be unaware of the meaning of the term product placement, or to choose to ignore its meaning and strongarm it into a needless metaphor about the popularity of Goethe's Werther.

The chapter on the ahosi of Dahomey and the chapter on Wonder Woman were the most interesting to me. The latter is based on Jill Lepore's The secret history of Wonder Woman, which I am now curious about.