Traversal

Popova (The Universe in Verse), creator of the blog The Marginalian, delivers a masterful exploration of life’s meaning by weaving together profiles of visionaries and discussions of science, art, and nature. She begins with Captain James Cook en route to Tahiti in 1769 to observe the Transit of Venus. Upon arrival, he documented a society startlingly unlike that of his native England, an anecdote that prompts Popova to reflect on humanity’s penchant to reject otherness (“the discomfort with which we recoil at cultural practices and personal choices different from our own... reveal[s] our own fears and insecurities”). Elsewhere, Popova discusses 18th-century chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who illuminated the nature of life by identifying oxygen and hydrogen; author Mary Shelley, whose novel Frankenstein reveals the power of social conditioning; abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who set out to prove one can “refuse to be made a monster by the world’s monstrosity”; and geologist Alfred Wegener, whose theory of continental drift forever altered humanity’s view of the planet. In Popova’s hands, their struggles and successes combine in a lyrical symphony of truth, made richer by reflections on the nature of the color blue, NASA’s Kepler mission, the 1815 eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora, the invention of the bicycle, and more. “Every story is the story of the world,” Popova deftly reveals. This is multifaceted and marvelous. (Feb.)