The Passage to Cosmos
Book description
Explorer, scientist, writer, and humanist, Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous intellectual of the age that began with Napoleon and ended with Darwin. With "Cosmos", the book that crowned his career, Humboldt offered to the world his vision of humans and nature as integrated halves of a single whole.…
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Why read it?
1 author picked The Passage to Cosmos as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
I loved this book for the way it explained things hiding in plain sight about the direction science took and the shape that America has today—doing so through the biography of Alexander von Humboldt.
Though I live near Humboldt Park in Chicago, I had no idea that he was so important in the Americas that the U.S. was going to name a state after him (it was instead named Nevada). I learned that he was the most important and famous scientist of the age for his attempt to unite all the sciences as different aspects of one cosmic whole: an…
From Steve's list on the invention of nature.
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