Traversal

Popova (The Universe in Verse), creator of the blog The Marginalian, delivers a masterful exploration of life's meaning by weaving together profiles of visionaries and discussions of science, art, and nature. She begins with Captain James Cook en route to Tahiti in 1769 to observe the Transit of Venus. Upon arrival, he documented a society startlingly unlike that of his native England, an anecdote that prompts Popova to reflect on humanity's penchant to reject otherness ("the discomfort with which we recoil at cultural practices and personal choices different from our own... reveal our own fears and insecurities"). Elsewhere, Popova discusses 18th-century chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who illuminated the nature of life by identifying oxygen and hydrogen; author Mary Shelley, whose novel Frankenstein reveals the power of social conditioning; abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who set out to prove one can "refuse to be made a monster by the world's monstrosity"; and geologist Alfred Wegener, whose theory of continental drift forever altered humanity's view of the planet. In Popova's hands, their struggles and successes combine in a lyrical symphony of truth, made richer by reflections on the nature of the color blue, NASA's Kepler mission, the 1815 eruption of Indonesia's Mount Tambora, the invention of the bicycle, and more. "Every story is the story of the world," Popova deftly reveals. This is multifaceted and marvelous. (Feb.)

A panorama of passionate minds. In 2006, Popova created the Marginalian, which has evolved into a web archive revealing her wide-ranging reading and search for meaning, both evident in her latest compendium. Deftly synthesizing a wealth of primary material, she considers thorny and ponderous questions: "What is life?" "What is death?" "What are the building blocks of personhood, of sovereignty, of identity? Where does the body end and the soul begin?" Biography, history, and cultural criticism inform her portrayals of an eclectic cast of poets and scientists, reformers and visionaries, including astronomers Johannes Kepler and Edmond Halley, intent on mapping the solar system; Captain James Cook, who led an expedition to Tahiti in 1769 to see the transit of Venus, and whose observations of Tahitian society--so alien from what he knew in Britain--resulted in a primitive version of cultural anthropology; and Mary Shelley, shaped by her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and entangled with a group of poets awed by the "immensity of the universe" and the dark depths of their own minds. There are natural philosophers Volta, Aldini, and Galvani, who delved into the mystery of animal electricity; chemist Antoine Lavoisier, condemned to death during the French Revolution, who identified and named hydrogen and oxygen; Humphry Davy, who "ushered in the dawn of biochemistry"; anthropologist Ruth Benedict, with a "porous curiosity about alternative societies," as eager to understand herself as she was to understand other cultures. And there is Walt Whitman, the unabashed celebrant of nature. In chronicling her subjects' intellectual and emotional passions, Popova makes much of intersections and interconnections among individuals, from various times, places, and circumstances, who have measured, dissected, rhapsodized, and invented as they grappled with the vexing conundrums, and the grandeur, of being. A stirring, kaleidoscopic intellectual history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.