The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by
It's not often that I feel a book deserves the hype it gets, but The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes genuinely is a great book. Accessible and witty, it explores an era of major scientific and human knowledge advancements, the people who made them, and the effects they had on poetry, theology, and society. Holmes ties the discoveries of various fields together in context, showing a kind of relay race of the advancement of knowledge, and talks about the lives and histories of the often jack-of-many-trades great minds thinking big ideas and investigating everything around them. For example, William Herschel was a musician/composer/inventor/astronomer and described some of his astronomy discoveries in musical/musical-math terms. Science creativity and prose/poetry creativity weren't segregated as being incompatible as they often are today. The Age of Wonder also speculates on the missed opportunities, such as when Humphrey Davy tiptoes right up to the invention of anesthesia but doesn't make that final leap, leaving people to suffer surgery in agonizing pain for many more decades. (Holmes mentions Fanny Burney's long and horrific account of going through radical breast surgery without anesthesia.) I was happy that in its exaltation of the wonders of the discoveries of that era the book doesn't skip over the less savory aspects such as colonialism, imperialism, and discrimination against women.
I have some quibbles. Since the book doesn't go in a strictly chronological fashion to let itself focus on a particular person or discipline, sometimes it's hard to figure out where exactly on the timeline you are. The book is very England-centric, to the point where you sometimes wonder if anyone anywhere else is doing anything until *cough* there's a small mention of advancements in France, Germany, Italy, the US, etc. With how far across decades and disciplines the book ranges, some sections held me better than others; my favorites were about William and Caroline Herschel, the brother and sister duo who used William's telescope upgrades to vastly expand humanity's knowledge and conception of space. (Among many other things, William found the planet that eventually came to be called Uranus, while Caroline was a comet hunter in her own right as well as his long-time assistant/amanuensis and the first woman to draw a salary from the king for scientific work.)
But the quibbles are small. I finished the book feeling inspired to think and dream and do and wishing contemporary US society didn't have so many factions that despise learning and investigation and want to take human knowledge back centuries. The people in this book were celebrities in their time. Some of them even had groupies. *g* It's so much better than keeping up with a Kardashian....
I have some quibbles. Since the book doesn't go in a strictly chronological fashion to let itself focus on a particular person or discipline, sometimes it's hard to figure out where exactly on the timeline you are. The book is very England-centric, to the point where you sometimes wonder if anyone anywhere else is doing anything until *cough* there's a small mention of advancements in France, Germany, Italy, the US, etc. With how far across decades and disciplines the book ranges, some sections held me better than others; my favorites were about William and Caroline Herschel, the brother and sister duo who used William's telescope upgrades to vastly expand humanity's knowledge and conception of space. (Among many other things, William found the planet that eventually came to be called Uranus, while Caroline was a comet hunter in her own right as well as his long-time assistant/amanuensis and the first woman to draw a salary from the king for scientific work.)
But the quibbles are small. I finished the book feeling inspired to think and dream and do and wishing contemporary US society didn't have so many factions that despise learning and investigation and want to take human knowledge back centuries. The people in this book were celebrities in their time. Some of them even had groupies. *g* It's so much better than keeping up with a Kardashian....