My love for ideas and their history was born when I was still in high school. It was my old English teacher who first opened up the power of ideas in literature to change the world. I’m pretty sure he loved Eleanor Roosevelt’s comment: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” Whether or not that’s true, my taste was further sharpened when I took a two-year course on the history of thought about nature and culture as an undergraduate student. I was captivated.
My book tells the tangled story of an idea that has haunted our collective imagination for centuries. What’s that idea? It’s that everything from the wealth of nations to the human mind itself is controlled by climate.
Almost every day, scientists, journalists, and politicians tell us that human-induced climate change is the greatest threat facing our planet. Yet behind that anxiety lurks an older, much deeper fear about the power that the climate exerts over us. In this book, I try to map the dark history of the thought that the rise and fall of civilizations, the advent of war, the management of empires, and the afflictions of the modern psyche have all been determined in one way or another by the climate.
This is one of the finest books I’ve ever read. It’s a monumental history of ideas about nature and culture from ancient times up to the end of the eighteenth century. I have consulted it countless times, and it’s now beginning to fall apart. But I hate discarding it, and I’ll likely end up with two copies when I soon have to buy it again.
I also had the great privilege of having a brief correspondence with the author when I was still a graduate student. Amazingly, he took the time to respond to my questions. So, it holds a special place in my heart. It convinced me of the huge importance of ideas about the environment and its history.
In the history of Western thought, men have persistently asked three questions concerning the habitable earth and their relationships to it. Is the earth, which is obviously a fit environment for man and other organic life, a purposefully made creation? Have its climates, its relief, the configuration of its continents influenced the moral and social nature of individuals, and have they had an influence in molding the character and nature of human culture? In his long tenure of the earth, in what manner has man changed it from its hypothetical pristine condition? From the time of the Greeks to our…
This book has long been my go-to guide on all matters related to the relationship between science and religion. Its beauty is that it takes a cool, clear-headed look at the history of a subject that frequently stimulates more heat than light.
It’s now over thirty years old but has aged extremely well–certainly better than I have! I still find it illuminating on episode after episode. The connections are subtle and complex; Brooke never allows us to settle for comfortable simplicity.
My admiration for this book knows no limits. Initially, I was put off by the title, but the subtitle says it all: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. I know of no other book that tells the remarkable story of the very idea that there’s something called ‘the humanities’ and how it emerged as a suite of disciplines in modern education.
In a book of this scope and scale, I find it stunning that the author seems to have included a witticism on every other page!
Many today do not recognize the word, but "philology" was for centuries nearly synonymous with humanistic intellectual life, encompassing not only the study of Greek and Roman literature and the Bible but also all other studies of language and literature, as well as history, culture, art, and more. In short, philology was the queen of the human sciences. How did it become little more than an archaic word? In Philology, the first history of Western humanistic learning as a connected whole ever published in English, James Turner tells the fascinating, forgotten story of how the study of languages and texts…
What I love about this book is the way it challenges the taken-for-granted thought that ‘truth’ is easily discovered. With compelling examples from the past, Shapin works through the ways in which scientific knowledge is made–the struggles that its practitioners have to engage in to construct and consolidate credibility.
What the author reveals is that trust is as fundamental in science as it is in everyday life. A revolutionary thought: who do we trust, and why?
How do we come to trust our knowledge of the world? What are the means by which we distinguish true from false accounts? Why do we credit one observational statement over another? This study engages these universal questions through a recreation of a crucial period in the history of early modern science: the social world of gentlemen-philosophers in 17th-century England. The author paints a picture of the relations between gentlemanly culture and scientific practice. He argues that problems of credibility in science were practically solved through the codes and conventions of genteel conduct: trust, civility, honour, and integrity. These codes…
What struck me about this book was its enigmatic subtitle: A Metabiography. Here, I encountered not a biography of the great Prussian scientific traveler Alexander von Humboldt but a host of different Humboldts: Humboldt the liberal democrat, Humboldt the Aryan supremacist, Humboldt the anti-slavery Marxist, and Humboldt the pioneer of globalization.
What I discovered is that biographers construct their subjects in the image of their own time and place. This impressed me with two thoughts: that all scientific reputations are fundamentally unstable and that all of us are composed of multiple selfhoods.
Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) is one of the most celebrated figures of late-modern science, famous for his work in physical geography, botanical geography, and climatology, and his role as one of the first great popularizers of the sciences. His momentous accomplishments have intrigued German biographers from the Prussian era to the fall of the Berlin wall, all of whom configured and reconfigured Humboldt's life according to the sensibilities of the day.This volume, the first metabiography of the great scientist, traces Humboldt's biographical identities through Germany's collective past to shed light on the historical instability of our scientific heroes.
I am a highly experienced outdoorsman, musician, songwriter, and backcountry guide who chose teaching as a day job. As a writer, however, I am a promoter of creative and literary nonfiction, especially nonfiction that features a thematic thread, whether it be philosophical, conservation, historical, or even unique experiential. The thread I used for thirty years of teaching high school and honors English was the thread of Conservation, as exemplified by authors like Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Edward O. Wilson, Al Gore, Henry David Thoreau, as well as many other more contemporary authors.
I have woven numerous delightful and descriptive true life stories, many from my adventures as an outdoorsman and singer songwriter, into my life as a high school English teacher. I think you'll find this work both entertaining as well as informative, and I hope you enjoy the often lighthearted repartee and dialogue that enhances the stories and experiences.
When I started teaching in the early 1990s, I brought into the classroom with me my passions for nature, folk music, and creativity. This book holds something new and engaging with every chapter and can be enjoyed by all sorts of readers, particularly those who enjoy nonfiction that employs wit, wisdom, humor, and even some down-to-earth philosophy.
Creativity, Teaching, and Natural Inspiration follows the evolution of a high school English teacher as he develops a creative and innovative teaching style despite being juxtaposed against a public education system bent on didactic, normalizing regulations and political demands. Doherty crafts an engaging nonfiction story that utilizes memoir, anecdote, poetry, and dialogue to explore how mixing creativity and pedagogy can change the way budding students visualize creative writing: A chunk of firewood plunked on a classroom table becomes part of a sawmill, a mine timber, an Anasazi artifact...it also becomes a poem, a song, an essay, and a memoir. The…
