The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science |  | Author: Richard Holmes
Publisher: Pantheon
List Price: $40.00
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Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 1339
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 576
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.7
ISBN: 0375422226
Dewey Decimal Number: 509.4109033
EAN: 9780375422225
ASIN: 0375422226
Publication Date: July 14, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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)
Product Description
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.
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 on his first Endeavour voyage in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discoveryâastronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophicalâswiftly follow in Richard Holmesâs original evocation of what truly emerges as an Age of Wonder.
Brilliantly conceived as a relay of scientific stories, The Age of Wonder investigates the earliest ideas of deep time and space, and the explorers of âdynamic science,â of an infinite, mysterious Nature waiting to be discovered. Three lives dominate the book: William Herschel and his sister Caroline, whose dedication to the study of the stars forever changed the public conception of the solar system, the Milky Way, and the meaning of the universe; and Humphry Davy, who, with only a grammar school education stunned the scientific community with his near-suicidal gas experiments that led to the invention of the minersâ lamp and established British chemistry as the leading professional science in Europe. This age of exploration extended to great writers and poets as well as scientists, all creators relishing in moments of high exhilaration, boundary-pushing and discovery.
Holmesâs extraordinary evocation of this age of wonder shows how great ideas and experimentsâboth successes and failuresâwere born of singular and often lonely dedication, and how religious faith and scientific truth collide. He has written a book breathtaking in its originality, its storytelling energy, and its intellectual significance.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 18
 An appetizer for the mind November 11, 2009
C. M. Levin
This is a sort of appetizer for anyone interested in the cultural context of 19th century science. There are some howlers in the notes (for instance, the Doppler shift was *not* used to determine the distance between the Milky Way & the Andromeda Galaxy), so I wonder who was Holmes' scientific fact-checker. On the other hand, many biographies of great scientists are amazingly smallbore, & Age of Wonder broadens the view.
 Bridging The Cultural Gap October 31, 2009
Michael Gunther (Maryland, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The Romantic Age (1750-1820) in Europe was a time when science and literature rubbed excitedly together, attracted by a shared love of Nature and an urgent desire to explore her secrets; it was a time when poets studied science, and scientists wrote poetry. "The Age of Wonder" exhibits a winding path across this landscape, from which sublime vistas and lively views open up on every side: explorers encounter Tahiti, and vice-versa; balloonists discern the patterns of village, forest, and river from an aerial perspective; astronomers pioneer the knowledge of deep space, and geologists the knowledge of deep time, while chemists transmute the chaos of nature into the order of its newly-discovered chemical elements.
Richard Holmes guides the reader on this journey using a sequence of linked biographies - explorers Joseph Banks (Tahiti) and Mungo Park (Africa), astronomers William and Caroline Herschel, chemist Humphry Davy - to view the Romantic Age of science through the lens of their lives and personal writings. Literary stars like Byron, Keats, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Coleridge appear in turn, albeit as satellites of Romantic science (e.g., Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), rather than as entire galaxies of Romantic literature. The science in the book is presented by and for the enthusiast rather than the initiate, and is both effortlessly accessible and vastly entertaining (the first "Mile-High Club" in a balloon, Davy's "scientific" dedication to getting high on laughing gas).
There is not even a hint of the "academic" in Holmes' writing, although it is quite thoroughly informed (see his endnotes, index, bibliography, and capsule biographies for proof, if any is needed). There is much food for thought here, about topics ranging from Vitalism to the Argument From Design, C. P. Snow's "Two Cultures," experiment vs. theory in science, the growth and structure of scientific institutions, administration and research, and public support of science. The book touches on all these areas, and many more, as they naturally come up in the course of its narrative.
By design and intention, this is a book about English, not Continental, science; Holmes is a literary biographer who specializes in the English Romantic Age (I intend to immediately buy his volumes on Coleridge, just on the strength of "The Age of Wonder.") While scientifically literate, he is not a scientist or a philosopher or historian of science. What the reader gets in "The Age of Wonder" is a book that deftly, even stunningly, illuminates the spirit of English science in the Romantic Age. It is a real pleasure to recommend it.
 Range of people limited October 6, 2009
Bob Wong (Oceanside, CA United States)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
Gives personality to scientific history September 26, 2009
JS (California USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
When I've taken science or history courses in school, I've found them to be anxious exercises in memorizing names, places, and dates that fail to take on much personal meaning as there is little time to delve into the characteristics and motivations of the people that shaped the informed world we live in today. Richard Holmes has fleshed out some of these outstanding figures for me in his elegant tapestry of biographies, his aim being not so much to explain science as to elaborate on the curiosity and bravery distincive to the world of the 17th century Romantic Era. Holmes uses everything at his disposal, from the journal entries and poetry of his subjects to his own experience as an editor, to create a read as compelling as the generation it depicts. Those who haven't been interesed in the subject matter before will find that reading this book makes the people of times past relatable and the discoveries they made fascinating.
A powerful pick for any interested in how science and trends develop September 18, 2009
Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
THE AGE OF WONDER: HOW THE ROMANTIC GENERATION DISCOVERED THE BEAUTY AND TERROR OF SCIENCE provides a riveting history of the men and women whose discoveries fostered the Romantic Age of Science. From a botanist's discoveries in 1769 to how the 'Age of Wonder' emerged from explorations and the efforts of William Herschel and sister Caroline and others, this is a powerful pick for any interested in how science and trends develop.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 18
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