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William2
Dec 30, 2015William2 rated it liked it
Shelves: 21-ce, germany, nonfiction, biology, nature, uk
3.5 stars. For me, this book was — like Why Nations Fail, Guns, Germs, and Steel and Orlando Figes’s The Whisperers— a keystone narrative that linked up many formerly disparate threads of my personal reading. Such books are rare pleasures. I had always known that Alexander von Humboldt’s story was a link missing from my general knowledge. The praises of Oliver Sacks and Stephen Jay Gould alone told me as much. But I didn't know this was generally due to anti-German sentiment so powerful in the U.S. and Europe after World War II.
During his Latin American explorations (1799-1804), Humboldt was front page news in the West. He and his team climbed volcanoes, pressed plants, murdered fascinating new animal species, reset the coordinates, often grossly incorrect, for scores of cartographic features (rivers, mountains, etc.), slept on the shores of the Orinoco River, dodged leopards, crocodiles and other predators, and were eaten alive by mosquitoes. This was a time when his name was a byword for adventure on the lips of every schoolboy, even in the U.S.
Afterward Humboldt returned to Europe, settling in Paris, where he wrote up his findings. What resulted was a series of paradigm-smashing publications for both scientists and general readers. He is the first true naturalist as we understand that term today. It helped that Humboldt was a writer of startling clarity and concision. Until then, it seems, writing for the masses was not considered a career-expanding opportunity by men of science. Author Andrea Wulf does not say why, but I think it probably had something to do with the presumed loss of reputation for so craven an act of moneymaking. Humboldt changed all that. Sacks and Gould and countless other writers would become beneficiaries of his breakthrough.
But his insight into the unplumbed market for science writing is secondary to his real achievement. Humboldt’s revolutionary act was to view nature as a unified force dependent upon myriad interactions and mutual reciprocities, not reduced to mind-numbing categories as taxonomists and other systematists were then doing. Humboldt saw the full ecological impact of forests; therefore, he was the first to warn about deforestation. He saw how greedy cash crops (monoculture), cleared needed forest, leeched the ground of minerals and emptied aquifers, thus touching the fates of countless animal species, including humans. Moreover, he saw the importance of expressing one’s personal emotional responses to nature and he wrote with a passion that repelled some cold men of science, but enlisted scores of readers from all walks of life.
He had as personal acquaintances Simón Bolívar, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, U.S. presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and Napoleon Bonaparte, who had him arrested briefly as a German spy. They all read him. His works constituted an epiphany for Charles Darwin, who took Humboldt’s Personal Narrative on board H.M.S. Beagle with him and who later met his hero. Henry David Thoreau could not have written Walden without Humboldt's example. The English Romantic poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Lord Byron all read and were influenced by him; as was Edgar Allan Poe, who dedicated his Eureka: A Prose Poem to him.
The major figures succeeding Humboldt and carrying his torch, if you will, include George Perkins Marsh, whose Man and Nature coalesced Humboldt’s environmental warnings, previously scattered throughout many volumes, into a clarion call for the conservation of the natural world; Ernst Haeckel, the prolific marine biologist, who virtually broadcast the Humboldtian sensibility to countless millions through his own popular books and articles; and John Muir, the almost comically ecstatic naturalist largely responsible for creating the U.S. federal parks system.
P.S. Humboldt was almost certainly homosexual. He usually had some slender young man with him in the guise of assistant. He avoided women like the plague, except those who could talk science, and he was said, if we are to believe Wulf (I do), to have disappointed entire cities of women who thought he'd make a fine match. His life was, in part, another bullet to the gizzard of that ridiculous fiction, the celibate bachelor. (less)
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David
May 24, 2016David rated it it was amazing
Recommended to David by: Charlene Lewis Estornell
Shelves: geology, natural-history, biography, ecology, environment, evolution, travel
This is a wonderful biography of a man about whom I knew very little. Today, in the United States, his name is practically unknown, despite being a world-wide celebrity in his day. Humboldt was a great explorer and scientist. He saw nature as a unified whole, an "organism in which parts only worked in relation to each other." His approach was holistic, and was entirely against the reductionist approach to science. Perhaps because of the influence of Goethe, Humboldt strongly advocated merging of art and science. In 1806, his writings were about evolutionary ideas, long before Darwin. In fact, Darwin took Humboldt's seven-volume book Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent along with him during his voyage aboard the Beagle. In his book Views of Nature, Humboldt wrote about how weather and geography influence the moods of people--and this was a revelation. He inspired generations of scientists, writers and poets, including Thoreau, Emerson, Darwin, and Jules Verne. Humboldt was also a strident abolitionist: He equated colonialism with slavery and "European barbarism." He befriended and greatly influenced Simón Bolívar's efforts to free South America from the tyranny of its colonial status. He was the world's foremost expert on Latin America.
When Humboldt was young, he yearned to participate in adventures and exploration. At the age of 27, he went off on an exploration of South America, an adventure that lasted five years. He survived terrible conditions, jungle heat, mountain cold, high-altitude sickness, and the torment of mosquitos. He did not take a large retinue, but only traveled with one scientist friend and a couple of guides. Along the way he took copious notes, a multitude of measurements with his scientific instruments, and lots of specimens of flora and fauna. He sent them back to Europe at regular intervals, in case he never made it back home alive.
Humboldt invented the concept of isotherms, that enabled a global understanding of climate. Back in Europe, he gave many free lectures in Berlin, encouraging people of all classes to attend. Half of the attendees were women. His lectures were unique, connecting "seemingly disparate disciplines and facts." He talked about the complex web of nature with "extraordinary clarity." He organized a remarkable conference of 500 scientists from all across Europe.
When Humboldt was 59 years old, he went on an expedition to Siberia. After analyzing the geology of certain areas in the Ural mountains, he predicted that he would find diamonds, and everyone thought he was crazy. But, he did find them!
He was at heart an environmentalist. He wrote a lot about the destruction of forests and long-term changes to the environment. He described three ways in which humans change the climate; deforestation, ruthless irrigation, and through steam and gas in industrial centers. He proposed a global network of stations to measure the Earth's magnetic field, and when it came about, he collected two million measurements over a three-year period.
Humboldt was a great explorer. He strongly encouraged explorers and artists to travel. He decried people who tried to do arm-chair science. He aided less fortunate scientists and explorers, giving them funds even though his own financial position was precarious. One American travel writer wrote that he "came to Berlin not to see museums and galleries, but 'for the sake of seeing and speaking with the world's greatest living man.'"
In this book, Andrea Wulf does much more that merely narrate the life of Humboldt. She also goes to great lengths to give the biographies of some other amazing people who were strongly influenced by Humboldt. In this way, we get a picture of how important Humboldt was, and still is. Humboldt was one of the first environmentalists and wrote so much about ecology. The book is well-written, well-organized, and fun to read. The descriptions of Humboldt's travels are gripping, as she writes about the dangerous climbs, diseases, and predators all around. I highly recommend it to everyone interested in nature, science, and exploration. (less)
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Beata
Oct 19, 2018Beata rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: favorites
This was an absolutely phenomenal read!! It’s a non-fiction but rarely do I read fiction books written so well and so well translated. And Alexander …… a most unusual man „since the deluge”. I’m delighted Andrea Wulf decided to write this book, which, in fact, is a homage to the scientist who undertook most extraordinary expeditions, who was interested in how nature works, and whose detailed observations regarding wildlife laid foundations for modern science and environmental studies. I’m not go ...more
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Jan-Maat
Aug 01, 2017Jan-Maat added it · review of another edition
Shelves: science, 21st-century, biographical, modern-history
Overall a nice book.
If I was giving star ratings then at times this book for me soared into five stars, at others it dredged through three star territory but because of the charm and vivacity and surprisingly upbeat approach to the book's subject I would not begrudge the book four stars and would generally encourage others to read it.
However I feel that Wulf's mind was pregnant with two books and in this one, both are conjoined and stillborn. There is the oddly optimistic and breezy book about ...more
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P.E.
Feb 13, 2020P.E. rated it it was amazing
Shelves: transcendentalism, ecology, biography, voyage, geography, treasure-hunt, vivid-dream, book-about-books, dossier-de-partage
He saw the earth as one great living organism where everything was connected, conceiving a bold new vision of nature that still influences the way that we understand the natural world.
I immensely appreciated reading this narrative. The Invention of Nature portrays polymath Alexander von Humboldt in the wider scheme of things, linking his expeditions and research to the times of swift and radical economical transformations, of lasting and growing social unrest, of wars and revolutions he live ...more
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Michael
Feb 11, 2016Michael rated it really liked it
Shelves: non-fiction, geology, history, biography, russia, biology, colonialism, ecology, philosophy, travel
This biography of Alexander von Humboldt was a revelation and a fun ride for me. This German scientist is credited with developing core concepts of ecology and documenting impacts of human development on the environment in early part of the 19th century. Wulf, who studied history of design and has written previously on the history of horticulture, aims with this accessible and well-illustrated account to rectify the near absence of recognition of Humboldt’s accomplishments in U.S. science education. Indeed, he didn’t come up in my studies of biology, and I only became aware of him through a recent read of Holme’s popular history of 18th and early 19th century science, “The Age of Wonder.” Through Wulf’s book I came to learn how he justifiably become the most well-known and respected scientist of his age and inspired so many other scientific developments and cultural movements more readily recognized today.
The book delves into Humboldt’s childhood in Prussia at the end of the 18th century. Though bookish and eager to study the natural sciences, he was pushed by his father toward more practical education and career in as a mining engineer while his older brother, Wilhelm, was supported in taking a more academic track. At least the work he subsequently engaged in for a mining company allowed him to dig into the fields of geology, chemistry, and metallurgy and fulfilled some of his interests in travel and exploration. Great minds attracted him like a magnet, and through a visit to his brother in Jena he soon immersed himself in the great ferment of culture and science there that led to the birth of German Romanticism. He formed a seminal friendship with Goethe, who lived nearby, and together they worked on experiments in ‘animal electricity’, theories of botany and geology, and digested the powerful ideas of Kant. The latter’s “Critique of Pure Reason” pointed a way for them for the subjective self to create knowledge and not just to passively mirror and reflect on external reality through the senses. The creative force of the mind and emotions became for them a key to knowledge and making a valid model of reality knowledge. This form of systems thinking was a foundation for his revelations on nature as an interconnected whole and man’s integral part within it.
After his father died, he inherited enough money to fund his keen desire to explore great unknowns in the world. The teeming life of equatorial jungles especially hungered him. However, a proper expedition required more money than he had and the colonial empires were proprietary about their new possessions. After getting shut out of a chance at French territories he eventually wangled permissions and financial support for an expedition to Venezuela. In his five years away, he supplemented his studies of botany and zoology in the rainforest with systematic approaches to climate and biogeography through study of progression from the lowlands to high altitudes of volcanic peaks. He consolidated his theories with further explorations in the Andes, Central America, and Cuba. Through ethnographic observations he came to appreciate the integrity and wisdom of indigenous peoples and become disturbed with the common vision of them as savages suitable for slavery and exploitation in colonial enterprise. He saw clearly the connection of colonialism, with its deforestation, focus on cash crops, and destructive mining practices, to degradation of the environment and prospects for extinction of species and native cultures. On his way back to Europe, he found a good ear for his discoveries in a stop in America with President Jefferson, who also favored progressive agrarian approaches and responsible stewardship for vast new territories acquired from France and just explored by Lewis and Clark.
Humboldt’s great skills in public speaking and marshalling his ideas into accessible writing made him an instant worldwide star in both intellectual circles and the populace at large. His non-stop talking and flitting from soiree to soiree in Paris inspired many significant thinkers and scientists who came into his path (others found him to be a egocentric bore). His work over decades in writing many volumes based on his field work was subsidized by King Friedrich Wilhelm III, who allowed him to set up shop in Paris, despite France being a frequent enemy in conflicts over these years. His successor forced him to work in Berlin, where he was led to found a university to make up for a gap in centers of learning. Eventually he was able to talk Wilhelm IV into subsidizing a scientific expedition to Russia, ostensibly to review mining practices but which Humboldt used as a platform for a jaunt of his own interest into remote regions of Siberia.
His magnum opus, Cosmos, written over a long swath of his later years, harnessed the work of many other scientists in a synthesis of many fields of science with their political, economic, and philosophical implications. Wulf works to bring his personality and personal life alive, but his choice to never marry or forge serious romantic relationships leaves the question of his sexuality or general deficiencies in sustaining intimate relationships a mystery. Wulf spends the last third of the book making a story of how his inspiration and seminal influences contributed to Darwin’s theory of evolution and Lyell’s formulation of geological principles. Direct links to Thoreau’s concepts of man’s integral part of nature and contribution to Transcendentalism are documented. The work of George Marsh in his book “Man and Nature” follows Humboldt’s footsteps in its revelations of environmental degradations from exploitive agricultural practices and overfishing in Egypt and the Mideast. The German biologist Hoeckel was inspired by Humboldt’s thinking about ecology and comparative anatomy to advance marine and developmental biology and use the esthetics of his experience of natural form to add ferment to the Art Nouveau movement. Finally. Humboldt’s personal enthusiasm with exploring wilderness and advocacy of conservation of such regions was a foundation for John Muir’s life and accomplishments with respect to establishments of preserves and national parks. Though the absence of a single clear theory on the order of Darwin’s contributed to Humboldt not sustaining a lasting place in the scientific edifice we all are privy to in school, he does deserve the respect Wulf accords him in the history of ideas.
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Bradley
Mar 07, 2019Bradley rated it it was amazing
Shelves: science, 2019-shelf
I was never taught a thing about this man in any of my courses, whether HS or college. Odd, right? Especially since he was a man so unambiguously RIGHT about so many things, had universal acclaim in his lifetime and for a long time afterward, but has, since WWI and WWII, been relegated to the dustbin of history because he HAPPENS to have grown up Prussian. That's Germany for you young whippersnappers not hip to what they called themselves back in Mozart's time.
So, WTF?
Here are some really cool ...more
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Roy Lotz
Jan 15, 2019Roy Lotz rated it liked it
Shelves: nature-writing, biography-memoir-travel
Alexander von Humboldt was a remarkable man. Simultaneously a savant and an explorer, he knew everyone, studied everything, and did his best to travel everywhere. Andrea Wulf brings together the many seemingly divergent worlds that he bridged: the worlds of Thomas Jefferson, Simón Bolívar, Napoleon, Goethe, Charles Darwin, and even Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He left his fingerprints on the worlds of science, literature, art, and even politics. Yet today he is (or was, before Wulf) a fairly obscure figure in the English-speaking world.
Thus this book is not simply a biography, but an attempt at rehabilitation. Wulf wishes to restore Humboldt to his place of honor; and she does this by arguing that his influence has been fundamental and pervasive. But before she can deal with Humboldt’s reputation, she must first narrate the scientist’s own coming of age. Humboldt was one of these figures with seemingly boundless energy, who threw himself into his work with complete abandon. We watch the young Humboldt as he struggles with, and finally throws off, the expectations of his upbringing, and then dashes away to South America. Once he embarks on his voyage, it does not take a strong writer—which Wulf is—to make his story exciting. Humboldt’s own travelogues were bestsellers.
Humboldt emerges from his travels with a concept of nature which, Wulf argues, was revolutionary and which became extremely influential. Wulf identifies three new elements of Humboldt’s approach to nature: First, that nature cannot be understood without both the scientific and the poetic eye; analysis and sentiment are necessary to do justice to the natural world. Second, that the living world must be understood as a gestalt, with organisms depending on one another in an intimate set of relationships that boggles the intellect. And third, that scientists must think on a global scale if they wish to understand the complex interactions between plants, animals, and climates.
This is the meat of the book. Yet it is here that I began to shift from enchantment to disappointment. For Wulf does not do nearly enough work to convince the skeptical reader that Humboldt’s view of nature was so entirely new. I would have appreciated far more background on previous conceptualizations of the natural world. Without this, it is hard to tell where Humboldt was innovative. Further, Wulf is always rather vague with Humboldt’s actual scientific contributions. She elects to keep the narrative pace driving forward, which doubtless helped her sales; yet I would have appreciated an explanation of Humboldt’s thought in more detail, with a good deal more quoting of the man.
Conversely, Wulf could have greatly reduced the space devoted to the men Humboldt influenced. She has individual chapters for John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Darwin, George Perkins Marsh, and Ernst Haeckel—space that she uses as opportunities to prove her thesis that Humboldt’s writings were fundamental to their success. But I found the level of biographical detail excessive, and her point overstated. She makes it seem as if these men owed their accomplishments—if not wholly, at least in large part—to Humboldt’s influence. But you cannot measure influence, and you cannot prove a counterfactual (what would they have done without Humboldt?). In any case, the point is entirely abstract without a more careful discussion of Humboldt’s ideas; lacking that, it is not possible to say where his influence begins or ends.
By now I am convinced that Humboldt was an important and compelling figure in the history of science. But I am far from convinced that his late obscurity was a mere result of anti-German sentiment caused by the two World Wars, as Wulf claims in the Epilogue. Too many other German scientists and philosophers remained famous. Rather, I think Humboldt may have fallen into obscurity because it is difficult to do justice to the nature of his contribution. Unlike Darwin, he did not originate any major scientific theory that could unify a great many phenomena under a simple explanation. Humboldt’s major contributions seems to be perspectival: seeing nature as complex yet whole, as godless yet beautiful, as vast and inhuman yet spiritually refreshing. And it is difficult to work that into a textbook. (less)