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Figuring

By: Maria Popova
Narrated by: Natascha McElhone
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Publisher's Summary

Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries - beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalysed the environmental movement.

Stretching between these figures is a cast of artists, writers, and scientists - mostly women, mostly queer - whose public contribution has risen out of their unclassifiable and often heartbreaking private relationships to change the way we understand, experience and appreciate the universe. Among them are the astronomer Maria Mitchell, who paved the way for women in science; the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, who did the same in art; the journalist and literary critic Margaret Fuller, who sparked the feminist movement; and the poet Emily Dickinson.

Emanating from these lives are larger questions about the measure of a good life and what it means to leave a lasting mark of betterment on an imperfect world: Are achievement and acclaim enough for happiness? Is genius? Is love? Weaving through the narrative is a set of peripheral figures - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman - and a tapestry of themes spanning music, feminism, the history of science, the rise and decline of religion, and how the intersection of astronomy, poetry and Transcendentalist philosophy fomented the environmental movement.

©2019 Maria Popova (P)2019 Canongate Books Ltd

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Outstanding Extraordinary Book

Recommended by a colleague but bought without knowing what to expect. Utterly blown away by the gifted craft of a superlative artist-writer. Astonishing in the depth of research and reflection, this is an outstanding work of art. It has introduced me to so many and so much of which I knew either only a little or nothing at all. The narration is equally divine. I’m personally pressing rewind.

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