Comment

The Invention of Nature

Alexander Von Humboldt's New World
Apr 23, 2017Mooseum rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
If history was written like this when I was in school, maybe I would have learned something. This biography of Alexander von Humboldt is full of adventure, copious details about Humboldt's life, and thorough adjunct information about Humboldt's friends and the people he influenced. It is as complete a viewpoint as Humboldt's own view of the world: everything is connected and that you can find meaning if you know how to use this information to make sense of the world. That Humboldt was an obsessive in his search for information about the natural world came through succinctly. What tempers this obsession is his ability to describe what he sees with a sense of poetry. It is important to be in nature, and through observation understand the world in which we live. Unfortunately, we have not learned this lesson. In the early 1800s, he witnessed and commented on how deforestation in South American, predicting climate change. His friends included individuals as diverse as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Simon Bolivar and Thomas Jefferson. His writings had a profound impact on Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, John Muir and Ernst Haeckel. Hopefully this book will revise interest in Alexander von Humboldt. He should not be forgotten.