List Books » Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Co: Abridged Edition
Authors: Alexander von Humboldt, Jason Wilson (Translator), Jason Wilson (Abridged by), Jason Wilson (Introduction), Malcolm Nicolson
ISBN-13: 9780140445534, ISBN-10: 0140445536
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Date Published: May 1996
Edition: ABR
Alexander von Humboldt became a wholly new kind of nineteenth-century hero - the scientist-explorer - and in Personal Narrative he invented a new literary genre, the travelogue. Between 1799 and 1804 he explored the tropical Spanish Americas, by his death in 1859 he had won international fame. He was the first European to discuss, draw and speculate on Aztec art, the first to observe reverse polarity in magnetism, the first to propagate the notion of seismic waves, the first to discover why America is called America. A true Romantic, an admirer of Rousseau and close friend of Goethe, Humboldt was a passionate observer, never a colonial despoiler, and his writings made a profound impact upon the course of Victorian science. This volume contains a fascinating selection from Humboldt's original 1,997 pages of Personal Narrative, in the first English translation to appear since 1851.