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The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
by Jason Roberts
An epic, extraordinary account of scientific rivalry and obsession in the quest to survey all of life on Earth—a competition "with continued repercussions for Western views of race. [This] vivid double biography is a passionate corrective" (The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice).
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. Each began his task believing it to be difficult but not impossible: How could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species—or as many could fit on Noah's Ark?
Both fell far short of their goal, but in the process they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, the future of the Earth, and humanity itself. Linnaeus gave the world such concepts as mammal, primate, and Homo sapiens, but he also denied that species change and he promulgated racist pseudoscience. Buffon formulated early prototypes of evolution and genetics, warned of global climate change, and argued passionately against prejudice. The clash of their conflicting worldviews continued well after their deaths, as their successors contended for dominance in the emerging science that came to be called biology.
In Every Living Thing, Jason Roberts weaves a sweeping, unforgettable narrative spell, exploring the intertwined lives and legacies of Linnaeus and Buffon—as well as the groundbreaking, often fatal adventures of their acolytes—to trace an arc of insight and discovery that extends across three centuries into the present day.
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (09-11-2025)
I'm still reading Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life by Jason Roberts. I'm only at about 32%. Fingers crossed I finish before its due date in about ten days!
-Lisa_B3
What are you reading this week? (9/04/2025)
Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life by Jason Roberts I'm only at 12% (eBook loan); so far it's been informative and interesting.
-Lisa_B3
What are you reading this week? (8/7/2025)
Working my way down BookBrowse's Award Winners' list and reading "The First State of Being" by Erin Entrada Kelly. I promised the kids a trip to the library and Barnes & Noble this weekend and plan to pick up "Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life" by Jason Roberts, the P...
-Anthony_Conty
Pulitzer Prize, 2025
"A lively, panoramic contribution to the history of science." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Enlightening...an enthralling look at a pivotal period in the history of biology." —Publishers Weekly
"[An] engaging and thought-provoking book, one focused on the theatrical politics and often deeply troubling science that shape our definitions of life on Earth." —The New York Times
"A fluent and engaging account of the 18th-century origins of Darwinism before Darwin." —The Wall Street Journal
"As Jason Roberts reveals in this vibrant scientific saga, taxonomists take up their mission with a mix of insight and foresight, colored by their moment in history, not to mention their foibles, their vanity, and their all-too-human prejudices...A story at once important, outrageous, enlightening, entertaining, enduring, and still evolving." —Dava Sobel, author of Longitude
"A skillfully told, ambitious-in-the-best-possible-way tale about hubris, curiosity, rivalry, and deep, deep obsession...The impossible race between these two men to catalogue the entirety of the natural world winds up illuminating some of the best and worst stuff about being human." —Jon Mooallem, author of This Is Chance!
This information about Every Living Thing was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jason Roberts is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. His previous book, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler, was a national bestseller and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A contributor to McSweeney's, The Believer, and other publications, he lives in Northern California.
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