Every Living Thing

• $23.00
• 1 mg
• Penguinrandomhouse.com

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • An epic, extraordinary account of scientific rivalry and obsession in the quest to know all life on Earth, told through the lives of the men who made it their life's work—from Carl Linnaeus, the botanist who revolutionized taxonomy, to Louis Agassiz, the paleontologist who became America's most infamous scientist. In the eighteenth century, two men—a German and a Swede—set out to understand the natural world. Their rival theories would shape every aspect of how we see life today, and their discoveries would transform the fate of all species. In the process, they created our modern understanding of nature, and of the human place within it. And they laid the groundwork for Darwin's theory of evolution—but that's only the beginning of this story. The journey to understand life on Earth is one of the great adventures of the human mind. It's also one of its greatest tragedies. In the course of their work, these men would come to question the very definition of what it means to be alive. And they would ultimately change the course of scientific discovery, and of human history, in ways they could never have imagined.