JOSH PURTELL
Resurrecting a Leviathan
Summiting mountains, paddling along the Orinoco, and riding across the dusty Llanos, historian Andrea Wulf struggled to reanimate a journey undertaken centuries before, in a time without airplanes or reliable maps. She found the path overgrown, almost as forgotten as the man who’d blazed it. Sifting through the thousands of scientific letters he’d feverishly written throughout his life, Wulf came to understand the extent to which Alexander von Humboldt’s view of the world shaped the great minds of his era. She came to understand how Humboldt, born a German aristocrat, pushed a continent to revolution and fought to preserve its natural beauty, inspiring a generation to do the same in his absence. She discovered a forgotten leviathan, the intellectual founding father unsung in our history books. Now she aims to change that in her book, “The Invention of Nature.”
September 22, 2017
