Urmila Chadayammuri in Nature:
“Between the scale of atoms and the scale of stars,” Maria Popova writes in the prologue to her daring book Traversal, “between the time of mayflies and the time of mountains, we exist as proteins lit up with purpose.” And she sets out to investigate just what this purpose is.
Popova is the acclaimed essayist behind the popular blog The Marginalian (formerly known as Brain Pickings). What started as an eclectic weekly newsletter sent out to inspire her colleagues’ creativity has ended up in the archives of the US Library of Congress as a gem of cultural heritage.
In Traversal, this incredibly interdisciplinary exploration of knowledge and meaning gets to grow across 600 pages. Whether she is writing about colonialist explorer James Cook, crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin or novelist Mary Shelley, about poetry, abolitionism or paint, Popova has a way of weaving one story into the next as if the boundaries between disciplines, cultures and centuries do not exist.
It is one of those books so ambitious in scope and form that it can only succeed — or fail — spectacularly. Traversal succeeds.
More here.
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