Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science by Christoph Irmscher (Author).Charismatic and controversial, Louis Agassiz is our least recognized revolutionary-some fifty years after American independence, he became a founding father of American science.
One hundred and seventy-five years ago, a Swiss immigrant took America by storm, launching American science as we all know it. The irrepressible Louis Agassiz, legendary at a young age for his work on mountain glaciers, focused his prodigious energies on the fauna of the New World. Invited to ship a sequence of lectures in Boston, he never left, turning into the most well-known scientist of his time. A pioneer in field analysis and an obsessive collector, Agassiz enlisted the American public in an enormous marketing campaign to ship him natural specimens, lifeless or alive, for his ingeniously conceived museum of comparative zoology. As an educator of tolerating influence, he trained a technology of American scientists and science academics, women and men alike. Irmscher sheds new light on Agassiz’s fascinating partnership together with his brilliant spouse, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, a science writer in her own proper who would go on to become the first president of Radcliffe College.
However there’s a darkish side to the story. Irmscher adds unflinching proof of Agassiz’s racist impulses and exhibits how avidly People looked to men of science to mediate race policy. The e-book’s potent, original scenes embody the pitched battle between Agassiz and his scholar Henry James Clark in addition to the merciless, typically amusing exchanges between Darwin and Harvard botanist Asa Gray over Agassiz’s cussed resistance to evolution.
A captivating life story, both inspiring and cautionary, for anybody interested in the historical past of American ideas.
I've been very excited by Agassiz since I've been very concerned about William James. Apart from studying the works of James, The Metaphysical Membership, Richardson's biography, the Dante Membership - I neglect, did that one point out Agassiz? How could it not? However as many books as I have read through the years the one big hole was that of Agassiz. Granted the author begins apologetically since Agassiz was amazingly hostile to Darwin and evolution, which as it's possible you'll recall, Menand considers one of many main points of settlement among the many American philosophers, none the much less the ebook honestly explains where Agassiz grew up and the explanation for his passionate dedication to science and an evidence of why evolution shouldn't be necessary. (It also has inspired me to eat better and train more.) It is a brief introduction to the person and his life and his thought and the affect he had on the beginnings of American scientific culture. A keeper! Can we then think about him a member of the philosophy ranks of the People? Good question.
I knew about Louis Agassiz's science accomplishments, and this is a refreshing biography to read. It reveals the human behind the legend, and exhibits how beneath, he was an individual like the rest of us with imperfections and flaws. It is attention-grabbing to see all of the politics and different relationships that occurred behind the scenes, reminding us that pure science isn't all the time so pure.
The ebook is very effectively written and simple to read. I'd charge it as one of the higher bios of scientists of that era. It made me wish that I had lived in that period of such nice scientists!
Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science
Christoph Irmscher (Author)
448 pages
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (February 5, 2013)
No comments:
Post a Comment