The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science

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Description

The Age of Wonder is a colorful and utterly absorbing history of the women and men 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 the lookout for new worlds. Other voyages of discovery—astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical—abruptly follow in Richard Holmes’s thrilling evocation of the second one scientific revolution. Through the lives of William Herschel and his sister Caroline, who perpetually changed the public conception of the solar system; of Humphry Davy, whose near-suicidal gas experiments revolutionized chemistry; and of the great Romantic writers, from Mary Shelley to Coleridge and Keats, who were inspired by the scientific breakthroughs of their day, Holmes brings to life the era in which we first realized both the awe-inspiring and the frightening possibilities of science—an era whose consequences are with us still.
Amazon Exclusive: Oliver Sacks on The Age of Wonder

Oliver Sacks is the writer of Musicophilia, Awakenings,The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and many other books, for which he has received a large number of awards, including the Hawthornden Prize, a Polk Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He’s a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and lives in New York City, where He’s a practicing neurologist. Read his exclusive guest review of The Age of Wonder:

I am a Richard Holmes addict. He’s 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 a whole 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 point 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)

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