The scope of Alexander von Humboldt’s fame once encompassed the whole world. A glacier in Greenland is named for him, along with mountains in China, Australia, Mexico, Venezuela and Antarctica; rivers and waterfalls in Brazil, Tasmania and New Zealand; a geyser in Ecuador; the Mare Humboldtianum on the moon. Milwaukee isn’t the only city to honor him with a street and park. Illustrating his accomplishments are the hundreds of plants, animals and minerals that carry his name, including species of lily, penguin and squid.
Humboldt was one of the world’s great scientists and explorers in the early 19th century, spanning continents and disciplines in a quest for knowledge and wisdom. Humboldt’s journeys inspired Charles Darwin; his writings influenced poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and proto-environmentalist Henry David Thoreau. He foresaw the Gaia Theory of the Earth as an organic entity.
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (Alfred A. Knopf) is everything a biography should be: grounded in scholarship, elegantly composed, telling a life’s story in the context of the subject’s era and through his accomplishments. Author Andrea Wulf seems to have read most of Humboldt’s writings, which were voluminous, and explored the naturalist’s multiple trains of thought to their many destinations. Humboldt was one of the last great Renaissance persons, comfortable in arts and science, able to absorb the thoughts of the ages and the findings of his own time. In Wulf’s account, Humboldt balanced the empirical with the emotional, measurement with imagination, specialization with a global view, recognizing that everything is connected with everything else. The Invention of Nature is one of 2015’s finest books on science.
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