★★★☆☆ What is Silk?

Silk: A World History

Aarathi Prasad

I have mixed feelings about Aarathi Prasad's Silk: A World History. It belongs to a nonfiction genre I call "history of substances". Notable books in that genre are Amy Butler Greenfield's A Perfect Red, which is about cochineal, the red dye that comes from the cochineal bug, and Sophie D. Coe's The True History of Chocolate.

I loved both of those books -- they were as fascinating as novels. I am sorry to say, though, that Silk was less gripping. By the time I reached the end, I was eager to get there. There was one specific problem and some more general ones.

Cochineal is a very specific thing -- it comes from the cochineal bug and no other source. That made Greenfield's job in A Perfect Red circumscribed. Coe likewise had a well-defined job in describing the history of chocolate -- it's a product of the cocoa tree Theobroma cacao.

Silk is NOT just one thing. Most of the silk you have ever seen is the product of the silkworm moth Bombyx mori. However, other moths and butterflies make silk for their cocoons. For instance, there are wild moths in India whose silk has been collected and woven into fabric by Indian women, including members of Prasad's own family. Thus we hear a lot about these wild silks. Spiders also spin fibers that are called silk, several different kinds, for egg cases and webs. Prasad even claims that the fan mussel Pinna nobilis makes silk. Other animals make fibers, too -- everyone knows about hair, which we call wool when it's woven into fabric. But no one on Earth thinks that wool is a form of silk.

Nowhere in Silk will you find a definition of the word "silk". At about 50% of Silk I looked at the Wikipedia page for silk, hoping to find a definition. I found nothing very useful down that rabbit hole. Silk fibers are made of a protein called fibroin (spidroins in the case of spider silks), but as far as I can figure "fibroin" is basically just defined as the protein of which silk fibers are made. Prasad makes it clear that there is no single chemical description of silk, nor a single evolutionary origin. I'm not saying I doubt that the fibers of the fan mussel are silk, but I do wish that Prasad had clarified her reasons for including it.

Besides this Prasad writes in a flowery style that sacrifices brevity and sometimes clarity. And she often digresses to tell stories about the personal lives of men and women who investigated silk, and about their political environments. Some readers will undoubtedly find all this as fascinating as Prasad herself does.

I know a great deal more about silk now than I did before I read Silk, and that is a good thing. I do not, however, know what exactly silk is, or what Prasad uses the word to mean.

I thank Edelweiss and HarperCollins for an advance reader copy of Silk: A World History. This review expresses my honest opinion.

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