Details
Synopsis
Too often, scientific historians focus solely on the achievements of individuals, and neglect to detail the cultural environment which either nurtured or hindered our greatest advancements in science and technology. Richard Holmes deftly avoids that trap with this thrilling history of the Romantic Age, the latter half of the 18th century, when men and women around the globe followed their sense of wonder at the natural world down the path to scientific discovery. Holmes uses the stories of individual scientists, such as William Herschel (discoverer of Uranus) and renowned British chemist Humphry Davy, to capture the zeitgeist of romanticism which marked their time, when people in all walks of life were endeavoring to replace ignorance with knowledge. Holmes blurs the boundaries between art and science by showing that Herschel's cosmological discoveries were inherently tied to his musical sensibility, while Davy was a poet at heart who lyrically described his reactions to his dangerous experiments inhaling untested gases.
| Size | | Length: | 552 pages | | Height: | 10.0 in | | Width: | 6.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.5 in | | Weight: | 34.4 oz |
Industry Reviews
"Holmes's biographical account makes his obsessive protagonists...the prototypes of the Romantic genius absorbed in a Promethean quest for knowledge....It's an engrossing portrait of scientists as passionate adventurers, boldly laying claim to the intellectual leadership of society." (starred review)
(06/01/2009)
"In this inspired work of history, Richard Holmes....writes with the supple narrative skill of a novelist, pulling threads together and weaving a cohesive tale of unlikely collaboration in an age of explosive beliefs."
(06/24/2009)
"[An] amazingly ambitious, buoyant new fusion of history, art, science, philosophy and biography....Mr. Holmes's 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."
(07/08/2009)
"In this big two-hearted river of a book, the twin energies of scientific curiosity and poetic invention pulsate on every page....[I]t's hard to read [Holmes's] luminous and horizon-expanding AGE OF WONDER without feeling some sense of diminution in our own imaginatively circumscribed times."
(07/19/2009)
"THE AGE OF WONDER is popular history at its best, racy, readable, and well documented."
(08/13/2009)
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