The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science Review

First off, this is a highly readable and entertaining work about an overlooked era of scientific achievement. There exists a gap in general science history between the foundation of Newton and subsequent progress of Faraday/Maxwell. Holmes brings this period into focus in the midst of a Romantic age while we ride through the streets of London in a carriage to an evening's science lecture and special effects extravaganza. This is all good. But Holmes looks at the era through the forty footer where the sweeper might have been a bit more effective. We follow Humphry Davy from first breath to last gasp in a detailed biography that at times simply distracts from the good stuff. On the other hand, I am much obliged for the details presented on William Herschel and Caroline. I was astounded by their accomplishments and wondered why this was new to me. I've read a lot of popularized science yet did not know of the team who expanded our narrow universe into deep space and manifold galaxies, who unveiled the evolution of the stars. Perusing my bookshelves, John Gibbin's The Scientists gives William Herschel two sentences; Arthur Koestler in the Sleepwalkers, no reference; Bill Bryson, two sentences and a footnote; Timothy Ferris' The Whole Shebang, no reference (although he gives them 10 pages in Coming of Age in the Milky Way) and so on. So thank you for that, Mr Holmes. The biography of Joseph Banks is also more balanced than Davy's nuanced depth, while the balloonists and jungle-hacking journey through Africa of Mungo Park expand the range of exploration. Then there are the poets, a seminal breed in a time possibly lost on the modern reader who might not appreciate the scope of poetic influence prior to the Twentieth Century with its more dynamic communications media. In a polarity reversal, unless you are acquainted with the Romantic poets' lives, you'll get scant help within, but the attention to their scientific influences is right on.

Mr Holms characterizes the emotion and intuition of the Romantic movement as reactionary to the formalistic and austere science pressing down on society and challenging its need for a Biblical creation and judgment. True enough, and we see a reflection of it yet again today as science flirts with DNA, cloning, and continued evolutionary revelation while the villagers in America light torches and teabags and chant in the streets, taking their cues from the electromagnetic medium that fuels their outrage. I personally feel that understanding the history of science, knowing of its hard-earned advance, and of the men and women who defied conformational thinking to free humankind from mind-numbing superstition, provides a wholesome appreciation of progress and the tremendous accomplishments of present-day research. Holmes ends with a summary statement reprising the rigid debates of science versus religion, science versus the arts, science versus traditional ethics. I would hope that by now - moving along rapidly in the Twenty-first Century - that we've earned the objective right to shift that inquisition to religion versus science, religion versus mythology, religion versus morality, and religion versus human rights.

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science Overview

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 discovery—astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical—swiftly follow in Richard Holmes’s 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 “dynamic science,” 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 miners’ 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.

Holmes’s extraordinary evocation of this age of wonder shows how great ideas and experiments—both successes and failures—were 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.


From the Hardcover edition.

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science Specifications

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)

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