100 books like Measuring the World

Alexander von Humboldt’s name is synonymous with scientific discovery today–the Humboldt Current, the Humboldt Redwoods State Park, and countless species named for him. Humboldt revolutionized our modern understanding of the natural sciences–geology, biology, meteorology, and much else–with his epic five-year voyage that set off in 1799 and brought him through the Amazon, the Caribbean, and North and South America. 

Like Malaspina before him, Humboldt studied not only the flora and fauna of these regions but also their peoples and the political turmoil that was building towards revolution. He met with the leaders of the time–Thomas Jefferson and Simón Bolívar among them–and opened their eyes to the richness of their lands. Unlike Malaspina, Humboldt’s works were published to wide acclaim and established the idea that all nature, including human nature, is interconnected. 

Every few years, I return to this book for its sheer elegance.

Richard Holmes made his name as the foremost biographer of England’s romantic poets–Shelley, Coleridge, the lot. Eventually, he fell, like them, under the thrall of the science of their age.

The attraction between artists and scientists was mutual. Coleridge attended the public lectures on chemistry by Humphry Davy because they “improved his stocks in metaphors”; William Herschel composed two dozen symphonies before he put an eye to a telescope; and Mary Shelley wrote (a few years after electricity made frog legs twitch) a darkly prescient account of baron Frankenstein’s deeds.

Richard Holmes’ book has all the uplift and effortless grace of a balloon flight (and my favorite chapter is on ballooning, actually–it serves as a prelude to Holmes’ equally spellbinding “Falling Upwards”).   

Another work that is wonderfully and winningly hard to pin down, Coming Through Slaughter is an imaginative and fragmentary collage of monologue, memoir, interviews, lyrics, photographs, archival material, hospital files—and white space—that builds a novelistic portrait of the mythical dark life and hard times of cornet player Buddy Bolden, one of the originators of jazz in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century. From the little that is known about Bolden and his music, Ondaatje shapes an audacious story that is short, cinematic, dream-like, and devastating, a book that incontrovertibly proved once again to me that there are many, many ways to tell the story of a life. 

Even though I grew up in Jamaica, which is about 334 miles from Haiti, I knew nothing about the 1937 Parsley Massacre, during which thousands of Haitians were executed under the orders of Dominican President Rafael Trujillo.

This book blends the personal love story of Amabelle and Sebastien with the history and politics of that time. I came away from this book with a greater understanding of survival, racism in the Caribbean, and the power of memory. 

I’m the daughter of two scientists, and this book was deeply important to me when I first read it. It helped me understand my parents’ passion for and pursuit of botanical knowledge. Many of the characters in this collection (a novella and stories) are fictional botanists, but historical figures appear in several stories. For instance, “The English Pupil” features an elderly Carl Linnaeus and explores themes of botany and regret.

For me, this book is a master class on using animals to write about humans without losing sight that animals aren’t human at all. It’s also laugh-out-loud hilarious because each story here is based on a real celebrity’s fateful encounter with an animal—and Millet uses a delightfully broad and irreverent definition of “celebrity.”

In this book, Noam Chomsky tries to sell a used gerbil habitat, Sharon Stone’s journalist husband is bitten and infected by a komodo dragon, and Madonna, in her British accent phase, shoots a pheasant badly. Millet’s precise prose satirically skewers our relationship with celebrities and creatures, inviting us to reconsider both.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, two astronomers set out from Paris, one due north towards Dunkerque, the other south towards Barcelona. Their task was to measure the length of the meridian arc between these two towns and, ultimately, to determine the precise length of the new-fangled meter, meant to serve as a unit of measurement “for all people, for all time.”

This may appear to be a humdrum task. It was anything but. At that time, royal heads fell, armies sprung from the ground, and money went into hiding. The author is as painstaking about historical detail as his protagonists were about their measurements. He left out no provincial archive and no calculation scribbled on a margin.

The outcome reads like a novel, splendidly conveying the quixotic flavor of the enterprise and the Sisyphus-like dedication of its protagonists.  

Again, fiction that is based on facts–but in this novel, the facts take over and engulf the reader in an apocalyptic tornado.

The book has an obsessive quality. Most of it deals with the life of the legendary mathematician John von Neumann, known as the “father of the computer,” who switched from pure mathematics to nuclear destruction, artificial life, and various other games.

Labatut’s admirably well-researched saga explores the inhuman face of science and the demonic aspects of progress “for which there is no cure” (copyright John von Neumann). A technological maelstrom to give Edgar Allan Poe the creeps, the book shows that romantic science has come a long way since Dr. Frankenstein. 

What struck me about this book was its enigmatic subtitle: A Metabiography. Here, I encountered not a biography of the great Prussian scientific traveler Alexander von Humboldt but a host of different Humboldts: Humboldt the liberal democrat, Humboldt the Aryan supremacist, Humboldt the anti-slavery Marxist, and Humboldt the pioneer of globalization.

What I discovered is that biographers construct their subjects in the image of their own time and place. This impressed me with two thoughts: that all scientific reputations are fundamentally unstable and that all of us are composed of multiple selfhoods.

Between 1799 and 1804 the Prussian polymath, Baron Alexander von Humboldt, explored South America and Mexico, studying and collecting from the natural world. He devoted the next 30 years to writing and publishing scientific treatises on his discoveries in physical geography and natural history. He established the concept of plant geography. In the final years of his long life, he worked to publish Cosmos, a work of enormous scope and depth—his vision of the nature of the world—and fundamental to the study of the history of natural history. I treasure in my library several of von Humboldt’s works and so found this summation of the travels and work of one of the world’s greatest natural scientists especially helpful. It is profusely illustrated.