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Book recommendation June 27, 2016

This is about the time where I traditionally ask for book recommendations, in order to have plenty to listen to while doing labwork. This year, however, I seem to have quite a few books already lined up to listen to. So I thought I’d suggest one to all of you. It’s called The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, by Andrea Wulf.

If you’re a biologist, Humboldt may already be familiar to you. If you aren’t, he was a German scientist and explorer who was arguably the first ecologist, in that he was most interested in how geography, climate, plants, humans, and other animals all interacted with one another, rather than cataloging individual species. He was also very good at explaining science in a variety of ways to a variety of people.

This is probably Humboldt’s most famous diagram. It’s a combination map and table of a really tall volcano in Ecuador, showing how all sorts of things change with altitude: temperature, pressure, the boiling point of water, the locations of different plant species, etc. He also compares it to other mountains.

I should warn that the book is not a particularly insightful biography. Wulf’s idea of probing a subject’s character is expressing surprise at a series of conflicting characteristics, rather than investigating those apparent contradictions. But she tells a good adventure story using lots of quotes from Humboldt’s travelogues and scientific publications. And since just one of Humboldt’s works was 34 volumes, this is a much more tractable read.

My favorite part of the book was the second half, which moved beyond Humboldt’s life to trace how he influenced 19^th and 20^th century thinkers. These range from the obvious (his books were one of the main inspirations for Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle) to the less obvious (Thoreau, John Muir, and the Art Deco movement). The inspiration Humboldt provided to all of them was his method of combining scientific data with sensory and emotional description. So I suppose, extremely indirectly, Humboldt also inspired my writing.