BOOK OF THE MONTH: OCTOBER 2016

                                                          
Title          : The Invention of Nature: 
                   Alexander von Humboldt’s New World
Author     : Andrea Wulf
Pages        : 496
Publisher : John Murray
ISBN        :10-1848549008
Price        : $ 13.24 

Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature, which lays out the life of the Prussian explorer and naturalist Humboldt, has won the Royal Society Insight Investment science book prize.  'The Invention of Nature' reveals the extraordinary life of the visionary German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and how he created the way we understand nature today. Though almost forgotten today, his name lingers everywhere from the Humboldt Current to the Humboldt penguin. Humboldt was an intrepid explorer and the most famous scientist of his age. 

His restless life was packed with adventure and discovery, whether climbing the highest volcanoes in the world, paddling down the Orinoco or racing through anthrax–infested Siberia. Perceiving nature as an interconnected global force, Humboldt discovered similarities between climate zones across the world and predicted human-induced climate change. He turned scientific observation into poetic narrative, and his writings inspired naturalists and poets such as Darwin, Wordsworth and Goethe but also politicians such as Jefferson. 

Alexander von Humboldt was the pre-eminent scientist of his time. Contemporaries spoke of him as second in fame only to Napoleon. All over the Americas and the English-speaking world, towns and rivers are still named after him, along with mountain ranges, bays, waterfalls, 300 plants and more than 100 animals. There is a Humboldt glacier, a Humboldt asteroid, a Humboldt hog-nosed skunk. Off the coast of Peru and Chile, the giant Humboldt squid swims in the Humboldt Current, and even on the moon there is an area called Mare Humboldtianum. 

Darwin called him the 'greatest scientific traveler who ever lived'. As with Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle 32 years later, all of Humboldt’s work was founded on a single momentous journey, which becomes the centerpiece of Wulf’s book. In 1799, Humboldt set off for the Americas with a botanist, Aimé Bon­pland, making landfall in modern Venezuela. Together they plunged by canoe into the botanic richness of the rain forests, ascending the Upper Orinoco, where Humboldt was the first to map the great river’s union with a tributary of the Amazon, a juncture that defied contemporary ­assumptions.

Review courtesy: http://www.nytimes.com