- Category: Books » Science » History
- Format: Hardcover Learn more about the Hardcover format using Tower WIKI.
- Publisher: Pantheon Books
- Number of Pages: 576
- ISBN: 0375422226
- WAPI (Tower ID): 112642706
- Release Date: July 14, 2009
- Average Customer Review: There are no customer reviews yet. Be the first to write a review!
- Tower.com Sales Rank: #31180 in Books (See Top 100 Books Bestsellers)
- #1027 in Science (See Top 100 Science Bestsellers)
- #10 in History (See Top 100 History Bestsellers)
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Product DescriptionMore Books by Richard Holmes (Author)Run a Quick Search on "The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science" by Richard Holmes to Browse Related Products:Browse more products related to "The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science"Browse more products related to "Richard Holmes"Review"THE AGE OF WONDER is popular history at its best, racy, readable, and well documented." "[An] amazingly ambitious, buoyant new fusion of history, art, science, philosophy and biography....Mr. Holmes's excitement at fusing long-familiar events and personages into something startlingly new is not unlike the exuberance of the age that animates his groundbreaking book." "In this big two-hearted river of a book, the twin energies of scientific curiosity and poetic invention pulsate on every page....[I]t's hard to read [Holmes's] luminous and horizon-expanding AGE OF WONDER without feeling some sense of diminution in our own imaginatively circumscribed times." "In this inspired work of history, Richard Holmes....writes with the supple narrative skill of a novelist, pulling threads together and weaving a cohesive tale of unlikely collaboration in an age of explosive beliefs." "Holmes's biographical account makes his obsessive protagonists...the prototypes of the Romantic genius absorbed in a Promethean quest for knowledge....It's an engrossing portrait of scientists as passionate adventurers, boldly laying claim to the intellectual leadership of society." (starred review) Publisher's noteThe winner of the Somerset Maugham Award presents the earliest ideas of the explorers of ôdynamic science,ö including William Herschel and his sister, Caroline, who changed the public's ideas about stars, and Humphry Davy, who invented the miners' lamp. A riveting 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. AnnotationToo often, scientific historians focus solely on the achievements of individuals, and neglect to detail the cultural environment which either nurtured or hindered our greatest advancements in science and technology. Richard Holmes deftly avoids that trap with this thrilling history of the Romantic Age, the latter half of the 18th century, when men and women around the globe followed their sense of wonder at the natural world down the path to scientific discovery. Holmes uses the stories of individual scientists, such as William Herschel (discoverer of Uranus) and renowned British chemist Humphry Davy, to capture the zeitgeist of romanticism which marked their time, when people in all walks of life were endeavoring to replace ignorance with knowledge. Holmes blurs the boundaries between art and science by showing that Herschel's cosmological discoveries were inherently tied to his musical sensibility, while Davy was a poet at heart who lyrically described his reactions to his dangerous experiments inhaling untested gases. If You Enjoy "The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Hardcover)", May We Also Recommend:
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