The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World

Good biography & argument for understanding nature passionately Montana Skyline On first reading, I made the mistake of taking Wulf's book primarily as a biography of Alexander von Humbolt: It is that (and a good one), but foremost it is an argument for a new understanding of nature. I should have paid more attention to the first part of the book's title: "The Invention of Nature" Alexander von Humbolt's New World. Ms. Wulf is making the case that a proper understanding (not simply appreciation) of nature includes, perhaps requires, a passionate enthusiasm. "Excellent and carefully objective biography" according to Dame Droiture. This book is pretty much everything you'd want from a scientific/explorer biography. It has adventure (Humboldt, we learn, was the most experienced mountaineer of his time), deep personal narrative (largely from excerpts of his own letters and notes), details about his scientific discoveries, and -- bonus -- an analysis of both corresponding contemporary scientific thought AND contemporary *art*. We learn, for example, that one of Humboldt's friends was the poet Goethe, and tha. Ashutosh S. Jogalekar said Scientist, explorer, polymath; the father of modern environmentalism. If I ask my learned friends to make a list of the top ten scientists in history, Alexander von Humboldt probably won't figure on the list; he probably wouldn't have figured on my own. And yet when he was alive, for a while Humboldt was the most famous scientist in the world. Thousands thronged to hear him speak, and the most distinguished personalities of the age visited him at his home in Paris and Berlin. He was a polymath in the true sense, excelling in science, philosophy,

His restless life was packed with adventure and discovery, whether climbing the highest volcanoes in the world or racing through anthrax-infested Siberia. Humboldt was the most interdisciplinary of scientists and is the forgotten father of environmentalism. Ironically, his ideas have become so accepted and widespread that he has been nearly forgotten. Wulf examines how his writings inspired other naturalists and poets such as Wordsworth, Darwin, and Goethe, and she makes the compelling case that it was Humboldt's influence on John Muir that led him to his ideas of preservation and that shaped Thoreau's Walden. With this brilliantly researched and compellingly written audiobook, she makes clear the myriad, fundamental ways that Humboldt created our u