Product Description
The Age of Wonder is a colorful and utterly absorbing history of the men and women 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 in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery?astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical?swiftly follow in Richard Holmes’s thrilling evocation of the second scientific revolution. Through the lives of William Herschel and his sister Caroline, who forever 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.com Review
Amazon Exclusive: Oliver Sacks on The Age of Wonder
Oliver Sacks is the author of Musicophilia, Awakenings,The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and many other books, for which he has received numerous awards, including the Hawthornden Prize, a Polk Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and lives in New York City, where he is a practicing neurologist. Read his exclusive guest review of The Age of Wonder:
I am a Richard Holmes addict. He is 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 an entire 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 brink 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)
Buy This book from Amazon Now! Shipping in Pakistan & Round the world available Click The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science to buy now.
About the Author
$25 for a kindle book???? They’ve got to be kidding–especially when there’s a print version available for $1 more. This is outrageous and should send any interested readers straight to their local library.
Rating: 1 / 5
I cannot begin to tell you how disappointed I am in the Kindle version of this book. There are no chapter divisions. There is no interactive table of contents. According to the NYT review, one of the great features of the print version of this book is the illustrations and charts. While there is a list of illustrations in the beginning of the book, I paged through the entire first chapter and did not find a single one. This leads me to believe that they are not in the Kindle version, although I didn’t have the time or inclination to “next page” from beginning to end. This is my first Kindle disappointment. And this for a book that is significantly more expensive than the usual Kindle best seller!
Rating: 1 / 5
The number of persons in this marvelous age is limited to but only a few people, though important enough to expand on their achievements in great detail, perhaps more than I care to know.
Rating: 3 / 5
Very well researched about an era I didn’t know much about before. Not a book you can read at one sitting – best in small bites. The author has done an amazing job of finding sources for his inventors/scientists. I’d read it again and plan on passing it along to others.
Rating: 4 / 5
I was interested in this from the description, and received it as a gift. But I’m personally interested in the science, and there are much more informative (and interesting) treatments of the history of science in that period. The prose about art was too dense for me. I’m sending it back.
Rating: 2 / 5