The book:
December’s Shelf Improvement is the riveting biography of a brilliant but forgotten pioneer of natural science. Alexander von Humboldt was described by Charles Darwin as ‘the greatest scientific traveler who ever lived’. Andrea Wulf’s enthusiastic and gripping biography does service to this immense compliment, and has been included in many top ten lists for biography, science and books of the year.
The Invention of Nature is both an adventure yarn and a story of ideas. Whilst von Humboldt was a fearless and enthusiastic explorer, navigating crocodile-infested rivers, climbing volcanoes and traversing Siberia with aplomb, he also challenged the very idea of how the world was to be viewed. Andrea Wulf captures the excitement of a golden age of discovery as well as revealing von Humboldt as a precursor to contemporary views on a vast range of sciences, from meteorology to environmentalism.
That so many of his countless ideas made their way into common knowledge, and flora and fauna, rivers and mountains and even part of the moon are named after him is a testament to a legend in his time. We are sure you will enjoy Andrea Wulf’s long-overdue eulogy to the ‘Inventor of Nature’.
What the Guardian thought:
Andrea Wulf’s enjoyable new book tackles Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian polymath, author and explorer. He transformed our understanding of physical geography and meteorology, and spent his life trying to bind together the workings of the Earth and ultimately the cosmos (a term he coined in its modern sense in Kosmos, his five-volume treatise on the unity of science, published between 1845 and 1862) through universal rules.
From an early age Humboldt clearly had a spark that made him remarkable. This was partly down to the help of his older brother, Wilhelm, also a polymath. While still a mere Prussian inspector of mines in his mid-20s he delighted and inspired Goethe and Friedrich Schiller on visits to Weimar, fiddling with electrical experiments and helping inspire Faust. He also met many of the other adventurers of the age, including, William Bligh, Banks and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, all of whom were affected by his ideas and energy.
Humboldt’s exploits were limited first by money (until an inheritance solved the problem), and then by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. His plans to go to the West Indies were stymied by all the sea battles going on, and he couldn’t view Mounts Etna and Vesuvius because Napoleon had invaded. He scouted around frenziedly for somewhere, anywhere, to go, and settled on South America almost by default. His charm and energy persuaded King Carlos IV of Spain to sign the papers that, unprecedentedly, allowed a non-Spaniard into Spanish America.
Wulf imbues Humboldt’s adventures there with something of the spirit of Tintin, relishing the jungles, mountians and dangerous animals at every turn. There is an excellent book of Humboldt’s adventure with some electric eels, which I won’t spoil here: it should be read either in Wulf’s book of Humboldt’s own matchless account of the trip, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Years 1799-1804. Through his extraordinarily vivid speeches and writing, he brought alive for European readers the colonialism, slavery, rapaciousness and ecological devastation he found in the Americas, making the conquest of much of the New World public, exotic but also shameful.
The great surprise in the book is that Humboldt planned an expedition to the Himalayas, to develop his comparative ideas about altitude, geology and plant life by comparing what he found in tropical America with conditions in Asia. Remarkably, the East India Company was no more enlightened than the Spanish government about admitting Humboldt, and spent many years blocking all his attempts to enter the country. This is tantalising: if only he had been given the chance to write Humboldt’s Travels in British India, it could have been one of the greatest and most devastating books of the 19th century.
Simon Winder - Read the full review
If you liked this, then try:
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The Cabaret of Plants by Richard Mabey
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The Invention of Science by David Wootton
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