The Invention of Nature

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wulf

Historian Andrea Wulf documents the life of the Prussian naturalist, explorer and geographer Alexander von Humboldt.

The book follows Humboldt from his early childhood and his travels through Europe as a young man to his journey through Latin America and his return to Europe. Wulf makes the case that Humboldt synthesized knowledge from many different fields to form a vision of nature as one interconnected system, that would go on to influence scientists, activists and the public.   The book is divided into five sections with monochrome figures, maps and coloured plates.

Part 1. Departure: Emerging Ideas

Wulf describes Humboldt's childhood with his emotionally distant mother. As a child his interests in nature and travel were not taken seriously. His mother, on whom he was financially dependent, insisted he become a civil servant. As a young man, Humboldt became friends with Goethe and other German intellectuals. His mother's death allowed him the freedom and financial independence needed to journey to the new world.

Part 2 Arrival: Collecting Ideas

Humboldt arrives in Cuba with his companion Bonpland and begins his journey through Central and South America. He brought with him a plethora of scientific instruments. He chronicles his travels and the measurements he obtained using scientific instruments in his journals. Humboldt climbs the Chimborazo Volcano, which was then believed to be highest mountain in the world. The trip concludes with his visit to the United States where he visited the White House to discuss science and politics with Thomas Jefferson before returning to Europe.

Part 3 Return: Sorting Ideas

Humboldt returns to Europe where he is greeted as a celebrity. He lives as an expat in Paris for a seven months as he finds the city and its scientific culture more stimulating than that of Berlin. While in France, he meets a young Simon Bolivar, who is impressed with Humboldt's knowledge and passion for his home country of Venezuela, and they discuss South American politics. Humboldt returns to Prussia, to earn a salary in the King's court before returning to Paris. At this point he begins to work several manuscripts based on his travels. The books are widely read. As Bolivar begins to plan and execute Revolutions in South America, Humboldt publishes a series of books on the politics of Latin America that criticize colonialism.

Part 4 Influence: Spreading Ideas

Wulf discusses Humboldt's personal correspondence and influence on a young Charles Darwin. Darwin attributed the inspiration for his voyage on the Beagle to Humboldt. Humboldt's influence on the American poet and philosopher Henry David Thoreau is explored. Humboldt's magnum opus Cosmos, where he talks of the interconnections of the natural world, is discussed

Part 5 New Worlds: Evolving Ideas 
This section deals with the old age and death of Humboldt at the fantastic age of 89.  Chapters outline and discuss Humboldt's legacy viz a viz George Marsh, and Ernest Haeckel (a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist, and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including anthropogeny, ecology, phylum, phylogeny, stem cell, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work in Germany).  A third chapter deals with John Muir, also known as "John of the Mountains" and "Father of the National Parks".  He was an influential Scottish-American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, glaciologist and early advocate for the preservation of wilderness in the United States.

Epilogue:  Alexander von Humboldt has been largely forgotten in the English-speaking world.  He was one of the last polymaths and died at a time when scientific disciplines were hardening into tightly fenced and more specialised fields.   As scientists are trying to  understand and predict the global consequences of Climate Change, Humboldt's interdisciplinary approach to science and nature is more relevant than ever.

The Blurb:  Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) is the great lost scientist - more things are named after him than anyone else. There are towns, rivers, mountain ranges, the ocean current that runs along the South American coast, there's a penguin, a giant squid - even the Mare Humboldtianum on the moon.

His colourful adventures read like something out of a Boy's Own story: Humboldt explored deep into the rainforest, climbed the world's highest volcanoes and inspired princes and presidents, scientists and poets alike. Napoleon was jealous of him; Simon Bolívar's revolution was fuelled by his ideas; Darwin set sail on the Beagle because of Humboldt; and Jules Verne's Captain Nemo owned all his many books. He simply was, as one contemporary put it, 'the greatest man since the Deluge'.

Taking us on a fantastic voyage in his footsteps - racing across anthrax-infected Russia or mapping tropical rivers alive with crocodiles - Andrea Wulf shows why his life and ideas remain so important today. Humboldt predicted human-induced climate change as early as 1800, and The Invention of Nature traces his ideas as they go on to revolutionize and shape science, conservation, nature writing, politics, art and the theory of evolution. He wanted to know and understand everything and his way of thinking was so far ahead of his time that it's only coming into its own now. Alexander von Humboldt really did invent the way we see nature.

What I thought:  a reading of this biography gave me a synthesis of much that I learnt during my three year degree course in Geology and Zoology, which I read in the early 90s.  I loved every minute of study and read as widely as I could around the subject. Coming to university study I was as keen as mustard, I would sit in the lecture theatre like a large sheet of blotting paper.  During that interval I rejected fiction as far being too superficial when there was so much learning I needed to do.  Since I gained that degree (and the PhD after, which frankly was a slog) I have never looked back in terms of my respect for my mother planet Earth and all that lives thereon.  Earth is my goddess, her ways my religion.  Her restlessness brings our planet alive and nowhere has reinforced this more than when I made a trip to Iceland after graduating and saw geological processes in action - vulcanity, tectonic plate spreading and ocean formation, hot springs and the waxing and waning of glacial activity.  During a reading of Wulf's book so many familiar names crop up in the text, Goethe, Schiller, Charles Darwin, Charles Babbage - the polymath and mathematician, another mathematician Carl Gauss, Henry David Thoreau.  Humboldt travelled with explorer and botanist, Aime Bonpland.  He consorted with Simon Bolivar.  As I read Wulf's detailed and thoroughly researched account (with a comprehensive section of notes, by page number,  giving references to quotes in the text) I was reminded from time to time of one of my favourite quotations, this by Isaac Newton: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants".  Humboldt and all those great men who were his associates, his thought-shapers, companions and adherents were giants, taking it in turn to stand on each other's shoulders, the better to consolidate their own discoveries and ideas.

Kolymsky Heights

Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson - 

Recommendation of Paul Light

Review from Amazon customer:  This is not my normal fare. It is a spy novel with some very interesting biotech and anthropological themes nicely embedded into a plot that spans about fifty years. It is a tribute to the author's cunning skill at how he succeeds in holding the reader spellbound across three continents in a massive (long) page turning epic. The characters are vivid, unusual and maybe even challenging. The research behind this book is tremendous and I have now learned so much more about Russia, the arctic, and most of all about Siberia. It certainly isn't dull and i was a pleasure to read a novel that had some running jumping and shooting, it wasn't overdone. There was very well written descriptive detail without it being too complex r prosaic. A fabulous read.

Of this novel Philip Pullman wrote that it was the best thriller he had read, four times.  And since Lionel Davidson has since died, Pullman is unlikely to read a better one.  "The best thriller I've ever read, and I've read plenty. A solidly researched and bone-chilling adventure in a savage setting, with a superb hero." 

Blurb:  A frozen Siberian hell lost in endless night. The perfect location for an underground Russian research station. It's a place so secret it doesn't officially exist; once there, the scientists are forbidden to leave. But one scientist is desperate to get a message to the outside world. So desperate, he sends a plea across the wilderness to the West in order to summon the one man alive who can achieve the impossible...

Plot summary:  A coded message is smuggled out of Russia, a plea for help from a super-secret laboratory deep in the frozen wastes of Siberia. The note is addressed to Johnny Porter, a Canadian Indian of the Gitxsan tribe with a genius for languages and disguises, and reluctantly he is forced to slip across the border on a rescue mission, the consequences of which he little imagines. The detailed picture of life in the Kolyma region and of the native peoples of the Russian Far East (such as the Evenks) and British Columbia (such as the Tsimshian) is impressive.

Like the Amazon review says:  "A fabulous read".

The Temporary Gentleman

The Temporary Gentleman by Sebastian Barry

Oh, Mr Barry, you can do no wrong!

I have read most of Barry's novels as the story of the Dunnes and the McNultys unfolds.  He singles out various members of  the family and documents chapters in their lives, the series being a patchwork of narratives about the lives of the various family members.  After reading Days Without End I checked the Wiki entry on Barry and found that there were two titles that I had not read, and The Temporary Gentleman is one such.

As usual you can count on getting a good review from the Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/29/temporary-gentleman-review-sebastian-barry-novel

Here is a review from an Amazon customer, modified where my opinion differed and which wasn't by very much, which nevertheless pretty much sums up how I felt about the book:

Sebastian Barry, as often he does, brings a lyrical sadness to this tale. I was knocked out by the opening sequence, it had something of the impact that the opening chapter of Enduring Love had.  The events described in that chapter constitute a forerunner to a number of nearly fatal disasters that befall Jack McNulty. But the main theme, the slow deterioration of a marriage and Jack's inability to face the degree to which he is destroying Mai, in spite of his constant protestations of love, is written in Barry's entirely engaging style. It is the voice of the story teller, the weaver of yarns. I love that style when his text flows over the page in one paragraph, seemingly seamlessly; if there is punctuation you do not notice it, and his powers of description, the words he finds are so far beyond the commonplace.  I picked up this book after I dropped my current read in the bath, just long enough to require a dry on the Aga and an iron, so not wishing to be without a bedtime comforter I chose that close to hand.  I read The Temporary Gentleman through two or three days, wanting to turn the pages....... and not really wanting to resume afterwards Knowledge of Angels which, being a 'set book', must be finished.   There are a number of sub-themes running through Barry's novel. One of these is the nature and impact of colonialism on both the colonised, and the coloniser. All of that is handled very well. The reader also meets Roseanne whose story will be told in Secret Scripture. Barry is a first class craftsman, ans this work confirms once more that he is a writer of real seriousness, but with that a master of story making.

To recap, here is a list of Barry's series:

The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998)

Annie Dunne (2002)

A Long Long Way (2005)

The Secret Scripture (2008)

On Canaan's Side (2011)

The Temporary Gentleman (2014)

Days Without End (2016)

Knowledge of Angels

Knowledge of Angels by Jill Paton Walsh.

THE BLURB:
It is, perhaps, the fifteenth century and the ordered tranquillity of a Mediterranean island is about to be shattered by the appearance of two outsiders: one, a castaway, plucked from the sea by fishermen, whose beliefs represent a challenge to the established order; the other, a child abandoned by her mother and suckled by wolves, who knows nothing of the precarious relationship between Church and State but whose innocence will become the subject of a dangerous experiment.

But the arrival of the Inquisition on the island creates a darker, more threatening force which will transform what has been a philosophical game of chess into a matter of life and death...

To read a success story in terms of self-publishing against the odd, do read the Review in the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/oct/24/jill-paton-walsh-a-life

And here is good review from the Independent.
The prince, the wolf-girl and the Inquisitor
WOLF-CHILDREN have always haunted human imagination, even though there is precious little evidence that any ever existed. In her novel Knowledge of Angels, Jill Paton Walsh explores this myth as a way of wondering what any of us might be like if left to grow up without human influence.

The urge to find answers to this question has also been a feature of history. In the 13th century Emperor Frederick II instructed a group of wet nurses to remain silent at their job in order to discover whether the babies in their charge would first speak Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic or their mother tongue. (In fact, under so odd a regime they all soon died.) In 1940 a psychologist husband-and-wife team kept a pair of twins - not their own - in isolation for their first 18 months to see how they would develop without any stimulation.

But in this novel, the author is interested in the symbolic rather than the developmental aspects of rearing an infant on its own. For as things turn out, waiting to discover whether the wolf- child Amara has an inherent knowledge (or ignorance) of the idea of God once she has acquired language is the pivotal point of the story.

To get to this position some good storytelling is needed, and Walsh is well qualified here. A skilled and prolific writer mostly of children's books, she brings a firm narrative hand to some otherwise unlikely events. The adventures of Amara, once separated from her wolves, are told in tandem with the story of Palinor. He is a glamorous middle-aged prince washed up on the 15th-century fantasy island where all these events take place. He comes from an advanced, equally mythological country where all or no faiths enjoy the same respect. As a gifted engineer and uninhibited sensualist, he has much to offer and soon makes friends. But under the island's laws, he is a unapologetic heretic and must therefore be put to death.

His only hope is last- minute conversion, and this task is given to the saintly Beneditx, a monk previously devoted to writing about angels. But Palinor makes short work of all his standard Roman Catholic proofs of faith, and it is Beneditx himself who finally comes to disbelieve. At this moment, enter the sinister figure of the Inquisitor from overseas - a thankless role in any work of the imagination long before Monty Python finally took them all on and won.

Palinor's last chance is with Amara, now more human than wolf. If she too shows no knowledge of God, then Palinor can be excused on the grounds that mere ignorance as a result of one's upbringing is not in itself heretical. But Amara, carefully coached by the nuns who guard her, answers pietistically and Palinor is doomed.

This story is half fable, half parable. It enters into dialogues about the nature of faith with wit and passion. Coming across it now is like going back 60 years to a time when such 'novels of ideas' might once receive good notices from T S Eliot in the Criterion, only then to fall foul of Orwell reviewing in Tribune. Often hypnotically readable, it engages in debates of more historical than contemporary interest. Principal characters move fluidly between ancient ignorance and Victorian rationalism while the surrounding proles remain happy with their lot and content to leave every decision to their betters. It is all rather like looking at a medieval illustrated manuscript recreated by a clever modern artist. Contrived, often describing an idealised world but with luminous moments quite outside the normal run of contemporary fiction, this is a serious children's book for adult readers, and none the worse for that

What I thought:
Until I read the Independent review it did not occur to me that this was a serious children's book.  I would hesitate to give it to either of my granddaughters, aged 10 and 12, who are committed and intelligent readers, who read beyond their age.  It is dark and disturbing and ultimately agonising when Palinor meets his fate.  I learnt stuff about the Inquisition, about the horrors, really, of  religious dogma and the cruel lengths to which men of God will go to force their belief on others or exact a dreadful penance.  I also discovered that the way a human brain and intellect receives something such as a novel is, certainly in my case, very much governed by the one's disposition and mental outlook at the time of reading.  What I am say is, don't read this book if you are feeling at all anxious or low.

IV III II I

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster

This is the blurb:

Nearly two weeks early, on March 3, 1947, in the maternity ward of Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the one and only child of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, is born. From that single beginning, Ferguson’s life will take four simultaneous and independent fictional paths. Four identical Fergusons made of the same DNA, four boys who are the same boy, go on to lead four parallel and entirely different lives.

As inventive and dexterously constructed as anything Paul Auster has ever written, yet with a passion for realism and a great tenderness and fierce attachment to history and to life itself that readers have never seen from Auster before. 4 3 2 1 is a marvellous and unforgettably affecting tour de force.

Review from The Guardian

One of several things Paul Auster shares with the protagonist of his new novel is an admiration for the 18th-century German writer Heinrich von Kleist, whose work (we know from Auster’s letters to JM Coetzee, published in 2013) “overwhelmed” Auster when he reread it seven years ago. “He tells and tells but doesn’t show much, which everyone says is the wrong way to go about it,” observes the hero of 4321, which might have been written to defy that boring old advice yet ends up confirming its wisdom.

A Bildungsroman, it lays out four parallel lives of Archibald Isaac Ferguson, born of Russian-Jewish descent in New Jersey in 1947. An early chapter ends after an uncle burgles his father’s white goods store; the next chapter rewinds the narrative, with the store burned down, not robbed. Auster replays it a third time – the store burns down with Ferguson’s father inside – before a final alternative shows the business thriving.

We’re lured in by Auster’s fine-grained scene-setting and intrigue at his intentions. The perspective is puzzling: we’re inside the protagonist’s mind but also told of what he was “still too young at that point to understand”. We’re curious, too, as to what Auster means when he says Ferguson’s parents appear “in the all-inclusive, authorised edition of The Book of Terrestrial Life”, a strange-sounding work that remains mysterious when it appears for the fifth and final time some 700 pages later.

By that time, 4321 has long settled into a largely unsurprising coming-of-age tale of sexual longing and literary ambition. Auster gives us heft without density: there are few stakes in this Borgesian garden of forking paths. The hero might sleep with Amy Schneiderman or Brian Mischevski; go to Columbia or Princeton; become a basketball reporter or a movie critic; get killed in a road accident or only maimed, but the story lines cancel each other out instead of adding substance.  

Paul Auster: ‘I'm going to speak out as often as I can, otherwise I can't live with myself'

Read more

The sentences, plausibly inspired by what Auster has called Kleist’s “great hatchet-blows of thought”, usually run about half the length of this review and often a good deal longer. But Kleist’s model sits ill with Auster’s preoccupations. Where Kleist’s 1810 novella Michael Kohlhaas “tells and tells” us about its hero’s bloody rampage, 4321 tells and tells us about Ferguson’s first taste of couscous or about how good he is at “parallel parking, the tight-squeeze operation that was the downfall of so many would-be motorists”. You can fill 864 pages pretty quickly writing like this.

While there’s an everyman tint to Ferguson, Auster is keen to show how special he is, whatever the incarnation. A girl from Brussels with “breasts fuller than might have been expected” tells him he knows “10 times more than any 10 of these idiot Americans put together” when he brings up Leopold II’s atrocities in the Congo (guess what the girl does next?). The “finest literary mind in Princeton” says it’s “a privilege” to meet him after reading his student short stories. When a prostitute says he’s “a good-looking boy with a pretty pecker”, there’s no question she doesn’t mean it.

As the last Ferguson standing makes it into the Nixon era, the novel’s girth guarantees suspense: how will Auster play the hand he’s spent so long assembling? That the novel should hymn the power of imagination is hardly a shock – he’s been here before – but in a book that is longer than his last three novels put together, the finale has the air of a bad joke. I can’t tell if it’s better or worse that he seems utterly sincere.

What I thought:  The critics seem to have been very harsh on Paul Auster.  I chose to listen to this novel on Audible.  All 35 hours of it.  There was good and bad in this decision.  Paul Auster's reading was easy to listen to and for the most part held my concentration.  However it took a while for the penny to drop when a particular section would be announced as "blank" because that incarnation of the young man Archie had died in a previous section.  For this a hard copy of the book was necessary, which I had in fact bought.  It is a fat tome and took, I believe, over 5 years to write.  Would I recommend it to my fellow readers.  Probably not unless you have loads of time to read, leg in plaster and up in traction (?!) and want something sustained to get your teeth into!

Daily Telegraph: "Paul Auster's new novel, 4321, is as big as his ego – review
Los Angeles Times: " For a doorstopper, Paul Auster's '4 3 2 1' is surprisingly light"   

Breakfast on Pluto

Breakfast on Pluto by Patrick McCabe

Breakfast on Pluto, Patrick McCabe's lyrical and haunting new novel, became a #1 bestseller in Ireland, stayed on the bestseller list for months, and was nominated for the Booker Prize, one of the world's most prestigious literary awards. With wonderful delicacy and subtle insight and intimation, McCabe creates Mr. Patrick "Pussy" Braden, the enduringly and endearingly hopeful hero(ine) whose gutsy survival and yearning quest for love resonate in and drive the glimmering, agonizing narrative in which the troubles are a distant and immediate echo and refrain. Twenty years ago, her ladyship escaped her hometown of Tyreelin, Ireland, fleeing her foster mother Whiskers (prodigious Guinness-guzzler, human chimney) and her mad household, to begin a new life in London. There, in blousey tops and satin miniskirts, she plies her trade, often risking life and limb amongst the flotsam and jetsam that fill the bars of Piccadilly Circus. But suave businessmen and lonely old women are not the only dangers that threaten Pussy. It is the 1970's and fear haunts the streets of London and Belfast as the critical mass of history builds up, and Pussy is inevitably drawn into a maelstrom of violence and tragedy destined to blow his fragile soul asunder. Brilliant, startling, profound and soaring, Breakfast on Pluto combines light and dark, laughter and pain, with such sensitivity, directness and restraint that the dramatic impact reverberates in our minds and hearts long after the initial impression................ so says Amazon.

This was a fairly rapid read, and cleverly crafted.  It was a set book for me being a Booker Prize Finalist.  The juxtaposition of violence associated with The Troubles in Ireland intercut with the seedy and sometimes humorous sides of Patrick (Pussy) Braden's life in London and Belfast made for a fast moving narrative.  I would not have read this title had it not cropped up on my reading list, and fortuitously found it in the tiny Canadian bookshop in rue Parcheminerie in a Paris Veme.