When Maren Meinhardt‘s A Longing for Wide and Unknown Things; the Life of Alexander von Humboldt was published in early 2018 by Hurst Publishers in London, it received quick and widespread praise from both literary as well as scientific reviewers. Unfortunately, as is the case with all-too-many excellent non-fiction works published in Great Britain these days, it never made its way across the Atlantic.
Fortunately, the small independent publisher BlueBridge Books appears to have picked up the US rights to it, and in late 2019 brought it out under the title Alexander von Humboldt: How the Most Famous Scientist of the Romantic Age Found the Soul of Nature.
Much more tightly focused on the life of Humboldt himself in his time than Andrea Wulf’s excellent but far more thematically expansive The Invention of Nature, Ms. Meinhardt’s book should be of great interest to those seeking a concise yet thorough recounting of Humboldt’s life and work, and its now expanded availability to those in the US as well as Europe should be seen as very good news indeed for all interested in the history of natural history as well as in the lies of prominent figures from the Romantic period.
