The Invention of Nature
Ratings16
Average rating4
15
Ratings16
Average rating4
From the Prologue...
When nature is perceived as a web, its vulnerability also becomes obvious. Everything hangs together. If one thread is pulled, the whole tapestry may unravel. After he saw the devastating environmental effects of colonial plantations at Lake Valencia in Venezuela in 1800, Humboldt became the first scientist to talk about harmful human-induced climate change. Deforestation there had made the land barren, water levels of the lake were falling and with the disappearance of brushwood torrential rains had washed away the soils on the surrounding mountain slopes. Humboldt was the first to explain the forest's ability to enrich the atmosphere with moisture and its cooling effect, as well as its importance for water retention and protection against soil erosion. He warned that humans were meddling with the climate and that this could have an unforeseeable impact on ‘future generations'.
The Invention of Nature traces the invisible threads that connect us to this extraordinary man. Humboldt influenced many of the greatest thinkers, artists and scientists of his day. Thomas Jefferson called him ‘one of the greatest ornaments of the age'. Charles Darwin wrote that ‘nothing ever stimulated my zeal so much as reading Humboldt's Personal Narrative,' saying that he would not have boarded the Beagle, nor conceived of the Origin of Species, without Humboldt. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge both incorporated Humboldt's concept of nature into their poems. And America's most revered nature writer, Henry David Thoreau, found in Humboldt's books an answer to his dilemma on how to be a poet and a naturalist – Walden would have been a very different book without Humboldt. Simón Bolívar, the revolutionary who liberated South America from Spanish colonial rule, called Humboldt the ‘discoverer of the New World' and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany's greatest poet, declared that spending a few days with Humboldt was like ‘having lived several years'.
Reviews with the most likes.
As I read about Humboldt's journeys, I was reminded of Will Farrell in the movie “Elf” telling the story of traveling through the gumdrop forest: the book is written for a 13 year old. It's got a total golly-gee tone, and could dispense with about every other sentence.
Everyone knows the amazon jungle is hot & humid, ok? Or when we are told Humboldt thought about something, e.g., electricity, he saw a mysterious force, and we hear nothing more.
The description of his relationship with Goethe did neither man a service. Again, reads like some sort of YA tale.
In short, there is very little intellectual depth or revelation here. It's just a storybook.
Gave up after 5 chapters. Two stars because it's not awful, it's just awfully dull and not very insightful.
I'd really give this more of a 3.5 - a fascinating book about a man I knew nothing about (and I suspect many others are the same). To me, the most interesting parts were the ones detailing his adventures in South America, and how he impacted George Perkins Marsh, Ernst Haeckl, and John Muir. There was a lot in the middle of the book, coinciding with AH's middle age, that was honestly a slog. Also, the way that Wulf uses (or doesn't use) commas just bothers the crap out of me for some reason.
I enjoyed this book! Not too deep but enough detail to give you a sense of the man, his interests, and his impact on the world of his time and it's ongoing effect around me today.
I found a kindred spirit; I've always been driven by a need to see and experience new things and I love a wide variety of science topics, and nature. I can't say this might have been me because I never had the desire to actually dive into the proving of hypothesis and the research itself.
