The age of wonder : how the Romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of science

Amazon.com Review Amazon Exclusive: Oliver Sacks on The Age of Wonder Oliver Sacks is the author 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) From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. The Romantic imagination was inspired, not alienated, by scientific advances, argues this captivating history. Holmes, author of a much-admired biography of Coleridge, focuses on prominent British scientists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, including the astronomer William Herschel and his accomplished assistant and sister, Caroline; Humphrey Davy, a leading chemist and amateur poet; and Joseph Banks, whose journal of a youthful voyage to Tahiti was a study in sexual libertinism. Holmes's biographical approach makes his obsessive protagonists (Davy's self-experimenting with laughing gas is an epic in itself) the prototypes of the Romantic genius absorbed in a Promethean quest for knowledge. Their discoveries, he argues, helped establish a new paradigm of Romantic science that saw the universe as vast, dynamic and full of marvels and celebrated mankind's power to not just describe but transform Nature. Holmes's treatment is sketchy on the actual science and heavy on the cultural impact, with wide-ranging discussions of the 1780s ballooning craze, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and scientific metaphors in Romantic poetry. It's an engrossing portrait of scientists as passionate adventurers, boldly laying claim to the intellectual leadership of society. Illus. (July 14) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. [This is the MP3CD audiobook format.] A 2009 New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year - Nonfiction 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' 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. "Here is a colorful, utterly absorbing history of the men and women whose discoveries and inventions gave birth to the romantic age of science. When Joseph Banks arrived in Tahiti in 1769, he hoped to discover paradise. Inspired by the scientific ferment in Britain, the botanist sailed with Captain Cook in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery follow in this thrilling account of the second scientific revolution. Through the lives of William Herschel and his sister, who changed the public conception of the solar system; Humphry Davy, whose gas experiments revolutionized chemistry; and the great romantic writers, from Mary Shelley to Keats, who were inspired by the scientific breakthroughs of their day, Holmes brings to life the era in which we first realized the awe-inspiring and the frightening possibilities of science."--Container "The Age of Wonder" explores the earliest ideas of deep time and space, and the explorers of "dynamic science": an infinite, mysterious Nature waiting to be discovered. Three lives dominate the book: William Herschel, his sister Caroline, and Humphry Davy