The 10 Best Books of 2009
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-12-10 10:47
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THE AGE OF WONDER: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
By Richard Holmes
Pantheon Books, $40.
Holmes harnesses the twin energies of scientific curiosity and poetic invention in this superb intellectual history, which recreates a glorious period, some 200 years ago, when figures like William Herschel, Humphry Davy and Joseph Banks brought “a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work,” and literary giants like Coleridge and Keats responded giddily to these breakthroughs, finding in them an empirical basis for their own faith in human betterment.