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Alexander von Humboldt was the most admired scientist of his day.
But the achievements for which he was most celebrated in his
lifetime always fell short of perfection. When he climbed the
Chimborazo, then believed to be the highest mountain in the world,
he did not quite reach the top; he established the existence of the
Casiquiare canal, between the great water systems of the Orinoco
and the Amazon, but this had been well known to local people; and
his magisterial work, Cosmos, was left unfinished. This was no
coincidence. Humboldt's pursuit of an all-encompassing, immersive
approach to science was a way of finding limits: of nature and of
the scientist's own self. A Longing for Wide and Unknown Things
portrays a scientific life lived in the era of German Romanticism
-- a time of radical change, where the focus on the individual
placed a new value on feeling, and the pursuit of personal desires.
As Humboldt himself admitted, he 'would have sailed to the remotest
South Seas, even if it hadn't fulfilled any scientific purpose
whatever'.
The Babel guide has 100 original reviews of books by leading
authors from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Each review provides
a kind of trailer for the work and is followed by an excerpt as a
taster, to let potential readers have an idea as to whether a work
might suit them. Alongside big names of German literature such as
Berholt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Gunter Grass - are
younger writers like Elfriede Jellinek, Thomas Bernhard, and
Patrick Susskind. With the reviews comes a database of German
fiction translated in the UK since 1950, with original titles and
current prices. This is the fourth in a series of accessible guides
to world fiction available in English translation, aimed at
journalists, academics, teachers and the ordinary reader.
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