The invention of nature Alexander von Humboldt's new world

Review by Choice Review

This beautifully written and magnificently illustrated volume focuses on the contributions of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), an adventurer, a scientist, and an explorer, and his influence on 19th-century scientific exploration and the naturalists who followed him, including Charles Darwin. A product of the German enlightenment, Humboldt investigated every natural component of the New World. His five-year journey exploring the Western Hemisphere and his scientific accomplishments, such as his measurement of the ocean current off the western coast of South America (Humboldt Current), are graphically depicted in this book. Wulf, a journalist and book author, e.g., Chasing Venus (CH, Oct'12, 50-0860), also discusses Humboldt's climb of Chimborazo in Ecuador, then known as the highest volcanic peak in the world. Wulf duplicated this feat, not always a recommended stratagem for modern authors attempting to capture the work of early explorers, but her ambitious efforts add considerable spice to her study. Humboldt had a radical view of nature, viewing it as an interconnected force, a "web of life," an idea that shaped Darwin's thinking. This is summarized in Humboldt's last and possibly greatest work, Cosmos (1845-1862), in which nature is depicted "as a natural whole" or organism. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers. --Joel S. Schwartz, CUNY College of Staten Island

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

THE GIFT OF FAILURE: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed, by Jessica Lahey. (Harper, $15.99.) Overinvolved, hypercompetitive parenting has stunted the competence and resilience of an entire generation of children, Lahey argues. As an educator and a mother, she is well situated to assess the damage: In her view, an intense fear of failure hampers the development of many young people. I MUST BE LIVING TWICE: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2014, by Eileen Myles. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $16.99.) Myles's poems in this collection thrum with energy, whether focused on attraction, appetites - for food or otherwise - or bygone selves. In her writing, "the birth of the cool often manifests itself with a kind of willful amateurism," our reviewer, Jeff Gordinier, wrote. THE INVENTION OF NATURE: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World, by Andrea Wulf. (Vintage, $17.) As a pre-eminent scientist who influenced Darwin and many others, Humboldt, a German naturalist, geographer and explorer, proposed that Earth is a single organism. Modern thought is suffused with his ideas, but the man himself has largely receded from view. Wulf revisits his stunning discoveries in her account, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2015. COUP DE FOUDRE: A Novella and Stories, by Ken Kalfus. (Bloomsbury, $17.) This collection's namesake novella centers on the fictional president of an international financial organization accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid. The masterly story, which closely resembles the real-life case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, "enters the mind of a megalomaniac who conflates his own ruin with that of the European economy," Andrew Sean Greer said here. FARTHEST FIELD: An Indian Story of the Second World War, by Raghu Karnad. (Norton, $16.95.) India's contributions to World War II - more than two million men and women served - have been all but scrubbed from prevailing accounts, even on the subcontinent. After unearthing his family's history, Karnad delves into the country's role in the conflict and the peculiarities of fighting in service of the British Empire even as India struggled for independence from it. UNDER THE UDALA TREES, by Chinelo Okparanta. (Mariner, $14.95.) Amid the chaos of the Biafran war, Ijeoma, a child in Nigeria, is sent away to work as a servant in another village. She soon falls in love - with another girl. After the pair are discovered, Ijeoma returns home and learns to reconcile her desires with a society intent on suppressing them. THE TWO-STATE DELUSION: Israel and Palestine - A Tale of Two Narratives, by Padraig O'Malley. (Penguin, $18.) O'Malley, who also researched seemingly intractable disputes in Ireland and South Africa, levels evenhanded criticism at both Palestinians and Israelis, and grimly assesses the feasibility - political and economic - of the two-state proposal, favored by leaders across the globe.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 23, 2016]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Born to a wealthy Prussian family in 1769, young Alexander von Humboldt dreamed of expeditions to far-away lands. But he was kept on a short leash by his widowed mother while he studied science, worked as a mining inspector, and met prominent thinkers, becoming especially close to Goethe. Finally, in 1799, Humboldt was able to sail to South America, where he and his crew traveled arduous distances at great risk, charting rivers, climbing mountains, and collecting thousands of specimens, groundbreaking endeavors Humboldt chronicled in brimming journals. A polymath with frenetic energy and epic curiosity, Humboldt practiced disciplined empiricism while also thinking imaginatively and holistically, ultimately forging a radical new understanding of nature as one vast web, a reality we still haven't fully grasped. Humboldt shared his findings in lyrical and galvanizing works that became best-sellers that influenced Charles Darwin and Henry David Thoreau, among countless others. Wulf (Founding Gardeners, 2011), a historian with an invaluable environmental perspective, presents with zest and eloquence the full story of Humboldt's adventurous life and extraordinary achievements, from making science accessible and popular to his early warnings about how deforestation, monoculture agriculture, and industrialization would engender disastrous climate change. Humboldt, Wulf convincingly argues in this enthralling, elucidating biography, was a genuine visionary, whose insights we need now more than ever.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) has been a major influence and inspiration in the world of science for centuries, though many are unfamiliar with his work today. Wulf composed this rich account to rekindle interest in the Prussian scientist and explorer. Throughout, she shows that Humboldt is responsible for how we think of the natural world today. In the audio edition, voice actor Drummond's deep and slightly raspy voice make Humboldt's adventures and interactions all the more exciting, and he masterfully captures flow of the prose. Drummond reads the scientific language with confidence and fluidity, which makes it easier for the listener to follow. A Scribner hardcover. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Although he was, according to Wulf (The Founding Gardeners), one of the most famous men of the early 19th century, Alexander von Humboldt is something of a footnote today, better known for his eponymous squid, current, and glacier than for his prodigious literary output. A tireless polymath and explorer, Humboldt undertook expeditions to four continents, collecting botanical and animal specimens and making countless measurements of phenomena from atmospheric pressure to the degree of blueness of the sky. Wulf argues that Humboldt's early romantic envisioning of the natural world as an interconnected, living web had a profound influence on the work of contemporary luminaries ranging from Goethe to Darwin to Thoreau. David Drummond does an outstanding job communicating both the author's enthusiasm for her subject and Humboldt's own rapturous feelings about the world. Despite feeling occasionally padded with an excess of biographic detail on some of Humboldt's acolytes, this work does great justice to a neglected forebear of modern environmentalism. Verdict Highly recommended for students of the history of science and environmentalism. ["Stimulating reading for those interested in general history, natural history, exploration, science, and philosophy": LJ 11/15/15 starred review of the Knopf hc.]-Forrest Link, Coll. of New Jersey Lib., Ewing © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Engrossing biography of "a visionary, a thinker far ahead of his time," who "revolutionized the way we see the natural world." For most of his life, explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was a household name. Never just a simple collector or adventurer, he poured out his ideas in lectures, conversations, and books that made him the public face of science during his era. In this fine account of an unbelievably energetic life, British commentator and historian Wulf (Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens, 2012, etc.) emphasizes that his insights marked the end of the universal view (at least among scientists) of animals as soulless automatons and the belief that humans were lords of the Earth. He ushered in the modern era of natural science, includingalthough he usually gets little creditenvironmentalism. Humboldt, writes the author "saw the earth as a great living organism where everything was connected, conceiving a bold new vision of nature that still affects how we understand the world." The son of a wealthy Prussian aristocrat, he used his money to finance his iconic, grueling 1799-1804 expedition through the jungles and mountains of Latin America, ending with a long visit to President Thomas Jefferson, a lifelong correspondent. He eventually returned to Europe, wrote of his experiences in 34 bestselling volumes, and continued to travel, lecture, write, and excite artists, poets, scholars, and scientists for the remainder of a very long life. Wulf pauses regularly for chapters on other great men who acknowledged Humboldt's immense influence, including Goethe, Simn Bolvar, Charles Darwin, Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Humboldt was the Einstein of the 19th century but far more widely read, and Wulf successfully combines a biography with an intoxicating history of his times. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Five months after his arrival, Humboldt finally left Quito on 9 June 1802. He still intended to travel to Lima, even though Captain Baudin wouldn't be there. From Lima Humboldt hoped to find passage to Mexico, which he also wanted to explore. First, though, he was going to climb Chimborazo - the crown of his obsession. This majestic inactive volcano - a 'monstrous colossus' as Humboldt described it - was about one hundred miles to the south-west of Quito and rose to almost 21,000 feet.[7]7  As Humboldt, Bonpland, Montúfar and José rode towards the volcano, they passed thick tropical vegetation. In the valleys they admired daturas with their large trumpet-shaped orange blossoms and bright red fuchsias with their almost unreal-looking sculptural petals. Then, as the men slowly ascended, these voluptuous blooms were replaced by open grass plains where herds of small llama-like vicuñas grazed. Then Chimborazo appeared on the horizon, standing alone on a high plateau, like a majestic dome. For several days as they approached, the mountain stood out against the vibrant blue of the sky with no cloud smudging its imposing outline. Whenever they stopped, an excited Humboldt took out his telescope. He saw a blanket of snow on the slopes and the landscape around Chimborazo appeared barren and desolate. Thousands of boulders and rocks covered the ground, as far as he could see. It was an otherworldly scenery. By now Humboldt had climbed so many volcanoes that he was the most experienced mountaineer in the world but Chimborazo was a daunting prospect even to him. But what appeared unreachable, Humboldt later explained, 'exerts a mysterious pull'. On 22 June they arrived at the foot of the volcano where they spent a fitful night in a small village. Early the next morning, Humboldt's team began the ascent together with a group of local porters. They crossed the grassy plains and slopes on mules until they reached an altitude of 13,500 feet. As the rocks became steeper, they left the animals behind and continued on foot. The weather was turning against them. It had snowed during the night and the air was cold. Unlike the previous days, the summit of Chimborazo was shrouded in fog. Once in a while the fog lifted, granting them a brief yet tantalizing glimpse of the peak. It would be a long day. At 15,600 feet their porters refused to go on. Humboldt, Bonpland, Montúfar and José divided the instruments between them and continued on their own. The fog held Chimborazo's summit in its embrace. Soon they were crawling on all fours along a high ridge that narrowed to a dangerous two inches with steep cliffs falling away to their left and right - fittingly the Spanish called this ridge the cuchilla , or 'knife edge'. Humboldt looked determinedly ahead. It didn't help that the cold had numbed their hands and feet, nor that the foot that he had injured during a previous climb had become infected. Every step was leaden at this height. Nauseous and dizzy with altitude sickness, their eyes bloodshot and their gums bleeding, they suffered from a constant vertigo which, Humboldt later admitted, 'was very dangerous, given the situation we were in'. On Pichincha Humboldt's altitude sickness had been so severe that he had fainted. Here on the cuchilla , it could be fatal. Despite these difficulties, Humboldt still had the energy to set up his instruments every few hundred feet as they ascended. The icy wind had chilled the brass instruments and handling the delicate screws and levers with half-frozen hands was almost impossible. He plunged his thermometer into the ground, read the barometer and collected air samples to analyse its chemical components. He measured humidity and tested the boiling point of water at different altitudes. They also kicked boulders down the precipitous slopes to test how far they would roll. After an hour of treacherous climbing, the ridge became a little less steep but now sharp rocks tore their shoes and their feet began to bleed. Then, suddenly, the fog lifted, revealing Chimborazo's white peak glinting in the sun, a little over 1,000 feet above them - but they also saw that their narrow ridge had ended. Instead, they were confronted by the mouth of a huge crevasse which opened in front of them. To get around it would have involved walking across a field of deep snow but by now it was 1 p.m. and the sun had melted the icy crust that covered the snow. When Montúfar gingerly tried to tread on it, he sank so deeply that he completely disappeared. There was no way to cross. As they paused, Humboldt took out the barometer again and measured their altitude at 19,413 feet. Though they wouldn't make it to the summit, it still felt like being on the top of the world. No one had ever come this high - not even the early balloonists. Looking down Chimborazo's slopes and the mountain ranges in the distance, everything that Humboldt had seen in the previous years came together. His brother Wilhelm had long believed that Alexander's mind was made 'to connect ideas, to detect chains of things'. As he stood that day on Chimborazo, Humboldt absorbed what lay in front of him while his mind reached back to all the plants, rock formations and measurements that he had seen and taken on the slopes of the Alps, the Pyrenees and in Tenerife. Everything that he had ever observed fell into place. Nature, Humboldt realized, was a web of life and a global force. He was, a colleague later said, the first to understand that everything was interwoven as with 'a thousand threads'. This new idea of nature was to change the way people understood the world. Humboldt was struck by this 'resemblance which we trace in climates the most distant from each other'. Here in the Andes, for example, grew a moss that reminded him of a species from the forests in northern Germany, thousands of miles away. On the mountains near Caracas he had examined rhododendron-like plants - alpine rose trees, as he called them - which were like those from the Swiss Alps. Later, in Mexico, he would find pines, cypresses and oaks that were similar to those that grew in Canada. Alpine plants could be found on the mountains of Switzerland, in Lapland and here in the Andes. Everything was connected. For Humboldt, the days they had spent travelling from Quito and then climbing up Chimborazo had been like a botanical journey that moved from the Equator towards the poles - with the whole plant world seemingly layered one on top of the other as one ascended the mountains. The vegetation zones ranged from the tropical plants down in the valleys to the lichens that he had encountered near the snow line. Towards the end of his life, Humboldt often talked about understanding nature from 'a higher point of view' from which those connections could be seen; the moment when he had realized this was here, on Chimborazo. With 'a single glance', he suddenly saw the whole of nature laid out before him. When they returned from Chimborazo, Humboldt was ready to formulate his new vision of nature. In the Andean foothills, he began to sketch his so-called Naturgemälde , an untranslatable German term that can mean a 'painting of nature' but it also implies a sense of unity or wholeness. It was, as Humboldt later explained, a 'microcosm on one page'. Unlike the scientists who had previously classified the natural world into tight taxonomic units along a strict hierarchy, filling endless tables with categories, Humboldt now produced a drawing. 'Nature was a living whole,' he later said, not a 'dead aggregate'. One single life, he said, had been poured over stones, plants, animals and mankind. It was this 'universal profusion with which life is everywhere distributed' that most impressed Humboldt. Even the atmosphere carried the kernels of future life - pollen, insect eggs and seeds. Life was everywhere and those 'organic powers are incessantly at work', he wrote. Humboldt was not so much interested in finding new isolated facts but in connecting them. Individual phenomena were only important 'in their relation to the whole', he explained. They were the parts that made the whole. Depicting Chimborazo in cross-section, the Naturgemälde strikingly illustrated nature as a web in which everything was connected. On it, Humboldt showed plants distributed according to their altitudes, ranging from subterranean mushroom species to the lichens that grew just below the snow line. At the foot of the mountain was the tropical zone of palms and, further up, the oaks and fern-like shrubs that preferred a more temperate climate. Every plant was placed on the mountain precisely where Humboldt had found them. Humboldt produced his first sketch of the Naturgemälde in South America and then published it later as a beautiful three-foot by two-foot drawing. To the left and right of the mountain he placed several columns that provided related details and information. By picking a particular height of the mountain (as given in metres in the first left- and right-hand column), one could trace connections across the table and the drawing of the mountain to learn about gravity, say, or the blueness of the sky, humidity, atmospheric pressure, temperature, chemical composition of the air, as well as what species of animals and plants could be found at different altitudes. Humboldt showed eleven zones of plants, along with details of how they were linked to changes in altitude, temperature and so on. All this information could then be linked to the other major mountains across the world, which were listed according to their height in the fourth column to the left. This variety and richness, but also the simplicity of the scientific information depicted, was unprecedented. Humboldt was the first scientist to present such data visually. The Naturgemälde showed for the first time that nature was a global force with corresponding climate zones across continents. Humboldt saw 'unity in variety'. Instead of placing plants in their taxonomic categories, he saw vegetation through the lens of climate and location: a radically new idea that still shapes our understanding of ecosystems today.   Excerpted from  The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf. Copyright © 2015 by Andrea Wulf. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.  Excerpted from The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wulf All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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