Investigates the social history of skin color from prehistory to the present, showing how our body's most visible feature influences our social interactions in profound and complex ways. This book explains why skin color has become a biological trait with great social meaning - a product of evolution perceived differently by different cultures.
"Among traits that differ between human populations, skin color is the most noticeable, the subject of the most comments, and the hardest to understand. In this fascinating book, Nina Jablonski negotiates this mine field and comes up with many surprises." -Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse
"Nina Jablonski is a world-renowned expert on human pigmentation, and one of the leaders in the science of anthropology. In Living Color she has done a brilliant job of explaining the biological and cultural significance of our skin tones in non-technical terms. Living Color should be required reading for every high school and college student." -Paul R. Ehrlich, author of The Race Bomb and The Dominant Animal
"Grounded firmly in the science of human history, this groundbreaking book brings the biological and social meanings of skin color into dialogue with one another, creating an open, rich, and essential conversation about this fact of life that differentiates us from one another but that ultimately, and profoundly, unites us." -Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of Faces of America and Tradition and the Black Atlantic
"What is most impressive . . . is how easily and simply it transitions from very biologically based data in the first section to more social and historical data in the second section."
