"Red hair, across every society where it has appeared, has been wrestled with as an unaccountable mystery," writes Jacky Colliss Harvey in Red: A History of the Redhead [Black Dog & Leventhal], which aims to demystify the rare trait.
And rare it is, appearing in just two percent of the population worldwide; Harvey explores how, from its earliest recorded incarnations, it has marked its owner as the "other"—historically a precarious position to occupy. Harvey nimbly describes human history from neanderthals to the twenty first century with compelling ease: a brief overview of the world through red-colored glasses.
But to call the book merely a history doesn't seem to cover the manifold angles woven into the text, from personal narrative to genetics, art history to psychological examination. Employing a cast of familiar characters—Mary Magdelene, Anne (of Green Gables), Charlie Brown's beloved Little Red Headed Girl, Mad Men's Joan Holloway—and chock full of baffling facts—our copper-topped cohorts feel pain more acutely than blondes and brunettes; redheaded men have been known to be banned from donating to sperm banks—Harvey leads us through shifting perspectives on redheadedness, raising deeper moral issues than the lighthearted examples initially suggest. Calling redheads fiery tempered or sexually uninhibited seems playful enough until it's remembered that physiognomy, inferring personality from physical characteristics, has been the basis for discrimination since the earliest humans. Harvey's intelligent exploration accomplishes the sought-after end of achieving universality from specificity, for, as she writes, "we are all barbarians to someone." Forcing a closer look at seemingly innocuous cultural stereotypes, Red is an important, fascinating read for redheads—and others—everywhere.
