Alexander Von Humboldt

This is a great and important book about a great & important man.

The Passage to Cosmos

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT AND THE SHAPING OF AMERICA

by

LAURA DASSOW WALLS

From the publisher: Explorer, scientist, writer, and humanist, Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous intellectual of the age that began with Napoleon and ended with Darwin. With Cosmos, the book that crowned his career, Humboldt offered to the world his vision of humans and nature as integrated halves of a single whole. In it, Humboldt espoused the idea that, while the universe of nature exists apart from human purpose, its beauty and order, the very idea of the whole it composes, are human achievements: cosmos comes into being in the dance of world and mind, subject and object, science and poetry.

Watch a short video of the author introducing von Humboldt & reading from the book HERE.