The most famous man you may never have heard of

  

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World

by Andrea Wulf

  

They should call this "A Natural History of Alexander von Humboldt." It's much more than the lifetime of a single man, a long-lived man but still only finite in his bodily form. Intellectually, his roots went deep, his floodplain spread wide--he used to joke that there were so many rivers named after him that he was a thousand miles long. (Note: that's a paraphrase from memory--I lost the exact quote.) His canopy shaded and nurtured all who came after him, and his seeds scattered throughout the world.  And so this biography treats with equal attention Humboldt's works and those of contemporaries who were heavily influenced by his works. Although--to be honest--who wasn't?  Goethe, Thomas Jefferson, Simon  Bolivar,  Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, John Muir  -- all were marchers in Humboldt's grand parade.

Although I enjoyed the book completely while I was listening to it, only later, when I did a quick Internet search to verify spellings of names, did I realize how much more the book might have covered. On matters scientific and botanical, it speaks at such a high level that you don't learn anything. You come away thinking, What a man!  But why couldn't it be: What a discovery!  What a thought!  What a odd connection of unrelated facts led to this great mind making such a brilliant leap!  And wow.

But that's not the book--it's strictly biographical as to what he did, where he went, who he met and what he wrote. And maybe, just maybe the author fulfilled her purpose...if her purpose was to make me go read Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, Geography of Plants, Views of Nature,  and of course Cosmos. Or at least the first volume of Cosmos.  To read it all might take the rest of my lifetime.