About this item
An epic, extraordinary account of scientific rivalry and obsession in the quest to survey all of life on Earth - a competition whose consequences still reverberate today - from the bestselling author of A Sense of the World. "[A] vibrant scientific saga . . . at once important, outrageous, enlightening, entertaining, enduring, and still evolving." - Dava Sobel, author of Longitude. In the eighteenth century, two men - exact contemporaries and polar opposites - dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster's flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France's royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities.
About the Author
Jason's debut nonfiction work, (HarperCollins) , was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics' Circle Award, longlisted for the international Guardian First Book Award, and named a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus Reviews and other publications. He is also the inaugural winner of the Van Zorn Prize for emerging fiction writers (sponsored by Michael Chabon) , and a contributor to the Village Voice, McSweeney's and The Believer. Norton will publish his next book in 2010.
