The Age of Wonder Lib/E: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

Product Description
A 2009 New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year - Nonfiction


The Age of Wonder is a colorful and utterly absorbing history of the men and women whose discoveries and inventions at the end of the eighteenth century gave birth to the Romantic Age of science.

When young Joseph Banks stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769, he hoped to discover Paradise. Inspired by the scientific ferment sweeping through Britain, the botanist had sailed with Captain Cook in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery--astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical--swiftly follow in Richard Holmes' thrilling evocation of the second scientific revolution. Through the lives of William Herschel and his sister, Caroline, who forever changed the public conception of the solar system; of Humphry Davy, whose near-suicidal gas experiments revolutionized chemistry; and of the great Romantic writers, from Mary Shelley to Coleridge and Keats, who were inspired by the scientific breakthroughs of their day, Holmes brings to life the era in which we first realized both the awe-inspiring and the frightening possibilities of science--an era whose consequences are with us still.
Review
''Richard Holmes--who is almost unfairly gifted both as a writer of living, luminous prose and as a tireless researcher--braids Herschel's story together with a dozen others to create the most joyful, exciting book of the year.'' --
Time, The Top 10 Everything of 2009

''[An] amazingly ambitious, buoyant new fusion of history, art, science, philosophy, and biography . . . Holmes' excitement at fusing long-familiar events and personages into something startlingly new is not unlike the exuberance of the age that animates his groundbreaking book.'' --
New York Times

''Holmes is certainly the man to undertake this intellectual salvage operation . . . Ambitious . . . Eloquent.'' --
Wall Street Journal

''In this big two-hearted river of a book, the twin energies of scientific curiosity and poetic invention pulsate on every page.'' --
New York Times Book Review

''Holmes' enthralling book itself exemplifies those qualities fostered by a scientific culture: the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe.'' --
Washington Post

''
The Age of Wonder is the long-awaited fermentation of the author's knowledge of the Romantic poets and his lifelong fascination with science.'' --
Economist

''A new model for scientific exploration and poetic expression in the Romantic period. Informative and invigorating, generous and beguiling, it is, indeed, wonderful.'' --
Guardian

''Holmes pursues his many-chambered nautilus of a tale with energy and great rigor, unearthing many lives and assembling remnant shards of biography, history, science, and literary criticism.'' --
Christian Science Monitor

''Captivating . . . An engrossing portrait of scientists as passionate adventurers, boldly laying claim to the intellectual leadership of society.'' --
Publishers Weekly (starred review)

''Rich in human foibles and thrills.'' --
Cleveland Plain Dealer

''If, like me, you didn't study much science after high school, this absorbing narrative will make you appreciate the gravity of your mistake . . . Reading it made we want to do college over, this time as a history of science major.'' --
Slate, Best Books of 2009

''What's superlative about
The Age of Wonder is that Holmes, author of vivid biographies of Shelley and Coleridge, takes the air out of the terms 'subjectivity' and 'objectivity' and reveals the ways in which the artists were as enveloped in science as the men and women in the labs around them. In a harmony of scientific and artistic sensibilities, he shows, the Romantics tapped the marvels of nature and sounded the infinite benefits of science. It's a song, if we can hear it, that can transform us today.'' --
Salon

''It was a singular time, and this is a singular book.'' --