發表於2024-07-01
The Invention of Nature pdf epub mobi txt 電子書 下載
ANDREA WULF was born in India and moved to Germany as a child. She lives in London, where she trained as a design historian at the Royal College of Art. She is the author of Chasing Venus, Founding Gardeners, and The Brother Gardeners, which was long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize and awarded the American Horticultural Society Book Award. She has written for The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. She appears regularly on radio and TV, and in 2014 copresented British Gardens in Time, a four-part series on BBC television.
www.andreawulf.com
The acclaimed author of Founding Gardeners reveals the forgotten life of Alexander von Humboldt, the visionary German naturalist whose ideas changed the way we see the natural world—and in the process created modern environmentalism.
Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was an intrepid explorer and the most famous scientist of his age. In North America, his name still graces four counties, thirteen towns, a river, parks, bays, lakes, and mountains. His restless life was packed with adventure and discovery, whether he was climbing the highest volcanoes in the world or racing through anthrax-infected Siberia or translating his research into bestselling publications that changed science and thinking. Among Humboldt’s most revolutionary ideas was a radical vision of nature, that it is a complex and interconnected global force that does not exist for the use of humankind alone.
Now Andrea Wulf brings the man and his achievements back into focus: his daring expeditions and investigation of wild environments around the world and his discoveries of similarities between climate and vegetation zones on different continents. She also discusses his prediction of human-induced climate change, his remarkable ability to fashion poetic narrative out of scientific observation, and his relationships with iconic figures such as Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson. Wulf examines how Humboldt’s writings inspired other naturalists and poets such as Darwin, Wordsworth, and Goethe, and she makes the compelling case that it was Humboldt’s influence that led John Muir to his ideas of natural preservation and that shaped Thoreau’s Walden.
With this brilliantly researched and compellingly written book, Andrea Wulf shows the myriad fundamental ways in which Humboldt created our understanding of the natural world, and she champions a renewed interest in this vital and lost player in environmental history and science.
##The book provides a comprehensive account of Humboldt’s work and his scientific spirit that influenced and inspired two generations of scientists, poets and writers, which compensates for a regrettable lack of intellectual depth and rigor, though it may very well be that a more intellectually challenging work was not what she set out to achieve.
評分如何讓一個人“永存”不朽?把他名字寫進書本,把他姓名作為物理量名稱,舉辦他的姓名的各類慶祝活動,給他立雕像塑料銅像蠟像,保存著他的遺體?人們想過很多辦法,偶爾一部分人瞭解真正“永存”的,隻有把思想帶給後人。而洪堡做到瞭,科學時代最後一個百科全書式的人物。 1...
評分##主題一以貫之的洪堡傳記,可看作通往洪堡著作的引子
評分##一個多月前,全世界天文學傢們公布瞭一則消息,說他們“看到”瞭引力波,這件事有劃時代的意義,用官方語言講,這叫做:以多種觀測方式為特點的“多信使”天文學進入一個新時代。總之,打個比方,把人類的生活比喻成一場大型的在綫網絡遊戲的話,毫無疑問,現在是宇宙online版...
評分 評分 評分 評分 評分The Invention of Nature pdf epub mobi txt 電子書 下載