| View Larger Image | The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science | Hardcoverby Richard Holmes (Author)
| List Price: | $40.00 | | Price: | $23.40 | | You Save: | $16.60 (42%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Hardcover | | Publisher: | Pantheon | | Page Count: | 576 Pages | | Publication Date: | July 14, 2009 | | Sales Rank: | 679th |
|
FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780375422225
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
|
EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
A riveting 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 on his first Endeavour voyage in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery—astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical—swiftly follow in Richard Holmes’s original evocation of what truly emerges as an Age of Wonder. Brilliantly conceived as a relay of scientific stories, The Age of Wonder investigates the earliest ideas of deep time and space, and the explorers of “dynamic science,” of an infinite, mysterious Nature waiting to be discovered. Three lives dominate the book: William Herschel and his sister Caroline, whose dedication to the study of the stars forever changed the public conception of the solar system, the Milky Way, and the meaning of the universe; and Humphry Davy, who, with only a grammar school education stunned the scientific community with his near-suicidal gas experiments that led to the invention of the miners’ lamp and established British chemistry as the leading professional science in Europe. This age of exploration extended to great writers and poets as well as scientists, all creators relishing in moments of high exhilaration, boundary-pushing and discovery. Holmes’s extraordinary evocation of this age of wonder shows how great ideas and experiments—both successes and failures—were born of singular and often lonely dedication, and how religious faith and scientific truth collide. He has written a book breathtaking in its originality, its storytelling energy, and its intellectual significance. |
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Exclusive: Oliver Sacks on The Age of Wonder Oliver Sacks is the author of Musicophilia, Awakenings,The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and many other books, for which he has received numerous awards, including the Hawthornden Prize, a Polk Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and lives in New York City, where he is a practicing neurologist. Read his exclusive guest review of The Age of Wonder: I am a Richard Holmes addict. He is an incomparable biographer, but in The Age of Wonder, he rises to new heights and becomes the biographer not of a single figure, but of an entire unique period, when artist and scientist could share common aims and ambitions and a common language--and together create a "romantic," humanist science. We are once again on the brink of such an age, when science and art will come together in new and powerful ways. For this we could have no better model than the lives of William and Caroline Herschel and Humphry Davy, whose dedication and scientific inventiveness were combined with a deep sense of wonder and poetry in the universe. Only Holmes, who is so deeply versed in the people and culture of eighteenth-century science, could tell their story with such verve and resonance for our own time. (Photo © Elena Seibert) |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 19 reviews)
|
Chronicling the transition from natural philosophy to science by James Donnelley (Berkeley, CA USA)  5 Stars
November 28, 2009
I loved this book. For me it captured some sense of the transition from "natural philosophy" (thinking about and speculating about nature) to science (making careful observations and weaving those observations into theories of nature). I loved how Richard Holmes brought some of the people involved in this transition to life. The role of Joseph Banks, the relationship between William and Caroline and John Herschel and many, many more delightful insights into the people who influenced the transition to scientific thought.
Here's a quote from John Herschel in the book that to me captures some of the sense of the Age of Wonder:
"To the natural philosopher there is no natural object unimportant or trifling...A mind that has once imbibed a taste for scientific enquiry has within itself an inexhaustible source of pure and exciting contemplations. One would think that Shakespeare had such a mind in view when he describes a contemplative man finding:
Tongues in trees - books in the running brooks
Sermons in stones - and good in everything
Where the uninformed and unenquiring eye perceives neither novelty nor beauty, he walks in the midst of wonders."
I know we all have our particular tastes, but this was for me the best book I've read - on any topic.
| |
An appetizer for the mind by C. M. Levin  4 Stars
November 11, 2009
This is a sort of appetizer for anyone interested in the cultural context of 19th century science. There are some howlers in the notes (for instance, the Doppler shift was *not* used to determine the distance between the Milky Way & the Andromeda Galaxy), so I wonder who was Holmes' scientific fact-checker. On the other hand, many biographies of great scientists are amazingly smallbore, & Age of Wonder broadens the view.
| |
Bridging The Cultural Gap by Michael Gunther (Maryland, USA) 5 Stars
October 31, 2009
The Romantic Age (1750-1820) in Europe was a time when science and literature rubbed excitedly together, attracted by a shared love of Nature and an urgent desire to explore her secrets; it was a time when poets studied science, and scientists wrote poetry. "The Age of Wonder" exhibits a winding path across this landscape, from which sublime vistas and lively views open up on every side: explorers encounter Tahiti, and vice-versa; balloonists discern the patterns of village, forest, and river from an aerial perspective; astronomers pioneer the knowledge of deep space, and geologists the knowledge of deep time, while chemists transmute the chaos of nature into the order of its newly-discovered chemical elements.
Richard Holmes guides the reader on this journey using a sequence of linked biographies - explorers Joseph Banks (Tahiti) and Mungo Park (Africa), astronomers William and Caroline Herschel, chemist Humphry Davy - to view the Romantic Age of science through the lens of their lives and personal writings. Literary stars like Byron, Keats, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Coleridge appear in turn, albeit as satellites of Romantic science (e.g., Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), rather than as entire galaxies of Romantic literature. The science in the book is presented by and for the enthusiast rather than the initiate, and is both effortlessly accessible and vastly entertaining (the first "Mile-High Club" in a balloon, Davy's "scientific" dedication to getting high on laughing gas).
There is not even a hint of the "academic" in Holmes' writing, although it is quite thoroughly informed (see his endnotes, index, bibliography, and capsule biographies for proof, if any is needed). There is much food for thought here, about topics ranging from Vitalism to the Argument From Design, C. P. Snow's "Two Cultures," experiment vs. theory in science, the growth and structure of scientific institutions, administration and research, and public support of science. The book touches on all these areas, and many more, as they naturally come up in the course of its narrative.
By design and intention, this is a book about English, not Continental, science; Holmes is a literary biographer who specializes in the English Romantic Age (I intend to immediately buy his volumes on Coleridge, just on the strength of "The Age of Wonder.") While scientifically literate, he is not a scientist or a philosopher or historian of science. What the reader gets in "The Age of Wonder" is a book that deftly, even stunningly, illuminates the spirit of English science in the Romantic Age. It is a real pleasure to recommend it.
| |
Range of people limited by Bob Wong (Oceanside, CA United States)  3 Stars
October 06, 2009
The number of persons in this marvelous age is limited to but only a few people, though important enough to expand on their achievements in great detail, perhaps more than I care to know.
| |
Gives personality to scientific history by JS (California USA) 5 Stars
September 26, 2009
When I've taken science or history courses in school, I've found them to be anxious exercises in memorizing names, places, and dates that fail to take on much personal meaning as there is little time to delve into the characteristics and motivations of the people that shaped the informed world we live in today. Richard Holmes has fleshed out some of these outstanding figures for me in his elegant tapestry of biographies, his aim being not so much to explain science as to elaborate on the curiosity and bravery distincive to the world of the 17th century Romantic Era. Holmes uses everything at his disposal, from the journal entries and poetry of his subjects to his own experience as an editor, to create a read as compelling as the generation it depicts. Those who haven't been interesed in the subject matter before will find that reading this book makes the people of times past relatable and the discoveries they made fascinating.
| |
SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (Modern Library Chronicles)
by Margaret MacMillan (Author)
Margaret MacMillan, an acclaimed historian and “great storyteller” (The New York Review of Books), explores here the many ways in which history–its values and dangers–affects us all, including how it is used and abused. The New York Times bestselling author of Paris 1919 and Nixon and Mao reveals how a deeper engagement with history in our private lives and, more important, in the sphere of public debate can guide us to a richer, more enlightened existence, as individuals and nations....
| 
| Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer
by Richard Holmes (Author)
This is the story of a young English biographer travelling alone through Europe in search of the romantic writers of the past. It begins when the author is 18, sleeping rough in the remote hills of the Cevenness and ends when he is 30, deciding to come home from his attic room in Paris.
| 
| Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places
by Bill Streever (Author)
From avalanches to glaciers, from seals to snowflakes, and from Shackleton's expedition to "The Year Without Summer," Bill Streever journeys through history, myth, geography, and ecology in a year-long search for cold--real, icy, 40-below cold. In July he finds it while taking a dip in a 35-degree Arctic swimming hole; in September while excavating our planet's ancient and not so ancient ice ages; and in October while exploring hibernation habits in animals, from humans to wood frogs to...
| 
| Darwin's Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution
by Iain McCalman (Author)
A group portrait of the three British voyagers who became fierce defenders of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Award-winning cultural historian Iain McCalman tells the stories of Charles Darwin and his most vocal supporters and colleagues: Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley, and Alfred Wallace. Beginning with the somber morning of April 26, 1882—the day of Darwin’s funeral—Darwin’s Armada steps back in time and recounts the lives and scientific discoveries of each of these explorers....
| 
| 13 Things that Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time (Vintage)
by Michael Brooks (Author)
Spanning disciplines from biology to cosmology, chemistry to psychology to physics, Michael Brooks thrillingly captures the excitement of scientific discovery.
Science’s best-kept secret is this: even today, thereare experimental results that the most brilliant scientists cannot explain. In the past, similar “anomalies” have revolutionized our world. If history is any precedent, we should look to today’s inexplicable results to forecast the future of science. Michael Brooks heads...
|
|
|
