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Your next favorite book
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From the Marginalian creator and bestselling author Maria Popova, a bold exploration of what makes a meaningful life.
What is life?
What is death?
What makes a body a person?
What makes a planet a world?
In Traversal, Maria Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with the bewilderment of being alive―our telescopes and our treatises, our postulates and our poems―through the intertwined lives, loves, and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, Alfred Wegener, Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Woven throughout their stories are other threads―the first global scientific collaboration, the Irish potato famine, the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue―to make the tapestry of meaning more elaborate yet clearer as the book advances, converging on the ultimate question of what makes life alive and worth living.
By turns epic and intimate―as concerned with the physical laws binding atoms into molecules as with the psychic forces binding us to one other―Traversal explores the universe between cells and souls to reveal the world, and our lives, in a dazzling new light.
"[Traversal] delivers a masterful exploration of life's meaning by weaving together profiles of visionaries and discussions of science, art, and nature ... In Popova's hands, their struggles and successes combine in a lyrical symphony of truth ... This is multifaceted and marvelous." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"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." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"In her second illumination of the symbiosis between literature and science, following Figuring (2019), Popova creates an even more luminous double helix ... One genius leads to another in a gloriously intricate web of connections and influences, struggles personal and societal ... Sorrows and marvels inspirit this exquisite and revelatory historical and biographical constellation incandescent with Popova's sustaining belief that "our love of truth will always triumph over our love of power." ―Booklist (starred review)
"Maria Popova is a national treasure. She combines poetic writing with prodigious historical research, a wide-ranging mind, and an extraordinary ability to connect literature and events from different places and times. Traversal is an intellectual feast of discovery and imagination." ―Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams
"What a brave and beautiful book. Maria Popova has a great gift for seeing the invisible threads that bind us, science, and poetry across space and time." ―James Gleick, author of Chaos
This information about Traversal 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.
Maria Popova is the creator of The Marginalian―a wide-ranging record of the search for meaning, founded in 2006 and included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. Her books and projects include Figuring, An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, and The Universe in Verse.
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