July 2019 Book, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World

From Russia to the jungles of South America to the Himalayas, an intrepid explorer’s travels make for exhilarating reading.
In a period roughly encompassing the second half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th, a handful of very young European men crisscrossed the world on ships and changed the way we think.

Exhibiting an almost mad degree of assurance, they beguiled committees, sea captains and patrons to take great risks and accommodate their often eccentric needs. Joseph Banks on the Endeavour, Georg Forster on the Resolution, Charles Darwin on the Beagle, Joseph Hooker on the Erebus and Thomas Huxley on the Rattlesnake seemed to have a hypersensitivity to the ideas around them and, influenced by their exotic surroundings, brought these to bear on the great scientific questions of the day. Darwin’s observations of earthquakes, finches and coral atolls were influenced by his reading of Charles Lyell and Thomas Malthus, while Humboldt took the works of Kant, Buffon and Goethe up the Andes and into the Orinoco.
Andrea Wulf’s enjoyable new book tackles Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian polymath, author and explorer. He transformed our understanding of physical geography and meteorology, and spent his life trying to bind together the workings of the Earth and ultimately the cosmos (a term he coined in its modern sense in Kosmos, his five-volume treatise on the unity of science, published between 1845 and 1862) through universal rules.

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