While I’m always pleased to see the arrival of a copy of a new book on a natural history subject that looks interesting, there are some that are greeted with a bit of extra excitement due to their subject, their author, or how long I’ve been wanting to read them. In the case of the copy of Prof. Gunnar Broberg’s The Man Who Organized Nature: The Life of Linnaeus that recently reached my desk, all three of these elements combined.
Originally published in 2019 in Sweden, Prof. Broberg’s new biography of Linnaeus is the final work of his long and distinguished career as a scholar in the history of science (he left this existence for what dreams may come in 2022). For over three years, all those eager to read this work who were unable to read Swedish have been waiting patiently – or in my own case at least, impatiently – for it to be translated into English. Now, thanks to the work of Dr. Anna Paterson, Prof. Broberg’s book has become one of the precious few biographies of Linnaeus to appear in English.
Given the importance of Linnaeus’ work to the history of science, his unusual and colorful life, and his sometimes unconventional – and even difficult to understand and reconcile – ideas (to me he’s second only to Newton in often being a puzzle when viewed from a modern day perspective), I am very much looking forward to discovering how Prof. Broberg applied his own lifetime of experience investigating and explaining the history of science to his students and readers to the remarkable and at times remarkably confusing person who was Linnaeus.
