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Historical A Perfect Red: Emire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire by Amy Bitler Greenfield $26.95 / HarperCollins / 2005 Amy Butler Greenfield has indeed chosen an odd topic for a historical narrative. Whereas most editors and literary agents prefer massmarket history books to be personality-driven or about racy topics (such as Thomas Laquer's history of masturbation), Greenfield instead tells the story of cochineal, a small insect native to Mesoamerica that lives on the nopal cactus, but which, after being harvested and dried, produces the world's best red dyestuff, which was prized by early modern Europeans and is still used today. In fact, the dye was second only to silver as an export of the Spanish colonies in America. Greenfield, the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of dyers, does a fine job in weaving together the threads of her vibrant narrative-Aztecs, explorers, conquerors, kings, merchants, bureaucrats, chemists, spies, and pirates all play their part in the story of cochineal. The very approachability of her prose and the amount of research she has clearly put into her subject make this a fascinating read; even academic readers will likely be grateful for the introduction to early modern trade systems (though they may be frustrated by the lack of footnotes or bibliography). HarperCollins has taken a bit of a risk in publishing such a work, and we earnestly hope that A Perfect Red does well, thus opening the way to more works of this sort. (It will also, incidentally, make you read labels more carefully, as Greenfield points out that cochineal is still used as a tint in many food products today.) —Ken Mondschein

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