2021 Book Recommendations

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

I am very excited to talk about one of the best books I have read in a very long time. It’s called The Invention of Nature, Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, and it’s by historian Andrea Wolfe.

During his lifetime, Alexander von Humboldt was probably the most famous person in Europe besides Napoleon. And in 1869, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, there were massive celebrations in his honor all over the world. There were hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of New York and Chicago and Melbourne, Australia, and Buenos Aires and Moscow.

And today there are towns and rivers named after him, mountain ranges, 300 plants, more than 100 animals, a glacier, an asteroid. In fact, Grant, the state of Nevada was almost named Humboldt in his honor.

So you may be thinking, who was this guy? That’s what I was thinking when I started reading this book. It turns out that Alexander von Humboldt was a German naturalist, a geographer, and a polymath. And he traveled through much of Latin America collecting specimens and recording observations that would forever change the way we look at nature.

And when he was a young man, he climbed what was then thought to be the tallest mountain in the world, in the Ecuadorian Andes. And when he was in his 60s, he traveled more than 10,000 miles into the remotest parts of Russia. He was just so hungry to learn so many things.

And Charles Darwin himself called Humboldt the greatest scientific traveler who ever lived. And get this, Grant, he was also a close friend of the German poet Goethe, and he befriended Simon Bolivar. And Thomas Jefferson was thrilled to welcome him to the White House. He’s sort of like the Forrest Gump of the 19th century.

So why don’t we still hold Humboldt in such high regard? Why doesn’t he have the popular consciousness that Einstein has, for example? You know, I’m hoping he will, Grant, because his most important contribution that I think people are just starting to take notice of again is that at a time when other scientists were looking at nature through the narrow lens of classification and hierarchy, he was describing nature as a web of life where everything was connected. He said nature is a living whole. And his views at the time, they were revolutionary and hugely influential. And he was actually in 1800 predicting human-caused climate change.

So I’m really hoping that people will rediscover this guy. I was just, this was a case where a dear friend of mine put this book into my hands and said, you got to read this book. And I looked at it, it was kind of heavy. And I thought, you know, and I read the book just to humor her. And I just, I read a few pages and 400 pages later, I can’t wait to read it again.

I’m not kidding.

You came up for air.

Yeah.

And so the book is?

The book is The Invention of Nature, Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, and it’s by Andrea Wolff, who also in 2019 published kind of a sequel. It’s a graphic nonfiction version of the book illustrated by Lillian Melker, and it’s something you just want to curl up with on a rainy afternoon and just luxuriate in.

Oh, I might have to take a holiday to the rainy climes just to read this book.

Thank you, Martha. That sounds wonderful.

I don’t think my book choice could be more different, Martha. It’s A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Untold Human Story Retold Through Our Genes by Adam Rutherford. You know, the more I have become interested in historical linguistics, the more I have become interested in historical genetics.

There has been a lot of multidisciplinary research that combines those two fields with things like anthropology and archaeology. And so I kind of wanted to expand what I knew about human genetic history.

So in this book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, and if that isn’t a brave title, I don’t know what a brave title is, Adam Rutherford explains what we’ve been able to learn from the traces of DNA found in hominid bones throughout the world and what we can surmise about the diet, the intelligence, the appearance, population size, migration patterns, and more.

For example, there were at least four human species that probably interbred. We know something about the whys and the wheres of redheads. We have strong clues about how many times the Americas have been settled and by whom. We can determine which populations of the world today have the most Neanderthal DNA, and we know that it doesn’t make them dull-witted.

But one thing the book does a really good job of is defeating our expectations that we will learn everything about ourselves through ancient DNA or that we’ll ever have a Jurassic Park moment and, for example, raise a Neanderthal clone. Rutherford is constantly regretful about how insufficient our language is to describe DNA in anything but scientific terms, how metaphors fall short or mislead. Calling DNA a map, a manual, or an epic poem can help us understand it. But, you know, our genes are not instructions or blueprints. And language like that, he says, doesn’t really help us recognize the fundamentally probabilistic nature of our genes. That is, you know, that it’s kind of a each gene is a dice roll. You know, it’s not an off or on. There’s a lot that goes into deciding what that gene will do.

But as he says in the final analysis, there’s an interview with him in the back that is very instructive. And he says, genetics underwrites all biology. It is the language that evolution is written in. And so I guess that’s one metaphor he can’t stay away from.

What does it mean that I am reading about the invention of nature and you’re reading about the history of everybody who ever lived?

Dorks.

In any case, these are the books that we’ve been enjoying lately. You know, we’d love to see pictures of the stacks of books next to your bed or couch.

Send them along to us on Twitter @wayword.

Or if you’d like to just explain what you’re reading and why you’re really liking it, send us an email, words@waywordradio.org.