The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World
by Andrea Wulf
Rating: 3.0 / 5 · Read · Finished 2017-11-21
This turned out to be less of a biography about Humboldt himself and more a collection of mini-biographies about people he met/influenced (for example Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, Simón Bolívar, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe). It’s a great overview of the politics and scientific advances of the 1800s, but the author was definitely trying too hard to make a narrative where there wasn’t one (the idea that Humboldt was the first to merge art and science, and spread that idea throughout all parts of 17th-century Western culture)