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Recently read books:
Consolation Songs, edited by Iona Datt Sharma, is an anthology of short sf and fantasy with hopeful if not happy endings, and is just what I need in these stressful times.
The Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf, is an intellectual biography of Alexander von Humboldt, a natural historian and explorer, who is among other things the namesake of the Humboldt Current, a friend of Goethe and of Simón Bolívar. Humboldt was interested in everything, it seems--his book on South America talked about geography, plants, and mineral resources, and also about slavery and poverty. Thomas Jefferson admired him, and invited him to visit; Humboldt, an ardent abolitionist, was less impressed with Jefferson.
The title of the book is because Humboldt seems to have invented, and certainly popularized, the concept of the natural world, Earth and everything in and on it as a connected whole.
The second half is chapters about people who Humboldt influenced, notably Darwin, Thoreau, and John Muir. I had heard, more than once, that Darwin took Lyell's Principles of Geology with him on the Beagle, but not that he also brought a book by Humboldt, to reread. The book ends with a bit on why Humboldt the person is almost forgotten in the US and UK, while his ideas have been influential to the point that people take them as given, the connections between humans and the natural world, nature as a living whole, climate zones...
Consolation Songs, edited by Iona Datt Sharma, is an anthology of short sf and fantasy with hopeful if not happy endings, and is just what I need in these stressful times.
The Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf, is an intellectual biography of Alexander von Humboldt, a natural historian and explorer, who is among other things the namesake of the Humboldt Current, a friend of Goethe and of Simón Bolívar. Humboldt was interested in everything, it seems--his book on South America talked about geography, plants, and mineral resources, and also about slavery and poverty. Thomas Jefferson admired him, and invited him to visit; Humboldt, an ardent abolitionist, was less impressed with Jefferson.
The title of the book is because Humboldt seems to have invented, and certainly popularized, the concept of the natural world, Earth and everything in and on it as a connected whole.
The second half is chapters about people who Humboldt influenced, notably Darwin, Thoreau, and John Muir. I had heard, more than once, that Darwin took Lyell's Principles of Geology with him on the Beagle, but not that he also brought a book by Humboldt, to reread. The book ends with a bit on why Humboldt the person is almost forgotten in the US and UK, while his ideas have been influential to the point that people take them as given, the connections between humans and the natural world, nature as a living whole, climate zones...
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