Rainbows: Nature and Culture

The rainbow is a compelling spectacle in nature – a rare bridge between subjective experience and objective reality – and no less remarkable as a cultural phenomenon. Daniel MacCannell’s enlightening, instructive and beautifully illustrated guide to the rainbow is the first of its kind. It describes what rainbows are and how they work, how we arrived at our current scientific understanding of rainbows, and how they have been portrayed in myths, the arts, politics and popular culture.