Summary
In Traversal, Maria Popova traverses the border between life and death, chance and choice, chemistry and consciousness: what makes a body a person? What makes a planet a world? How do we safeguard our love of truth from our lust for power? What slakes our longings and what redeems our losses?
Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with these questions - our telescopes and our treatises, our postulates and our poems - through the intertwined lives, loves and l…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781837265619 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1837265615 |
| Author: | Maria Popova |
| Publisher: | Canongate Books |
| Imprint: | Canongate Books |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 608 |
| Release Date: | 9 June 2026 |
| Weight: | 867g |
| Dimensions: | 48mm x 159mm x 240mm |
You Can Find This Book In
Critics Review
What a brave and beautiful book. Maria Popova has a great gift for seeing the invisible threads that bind us, science and poetry, across space and time – JAMES GLEICK
Maria Popova is a national treasure. She combines poetic writing with prodigious historical research, a wide ranging mind, and an extraordinary ability to connect literature and events from different places and times. Traversal is an intellectual feast of discovery and imagination – ALAN LIGHTMAN
Praise for Maria Popova’s Figuring: Popova writes beautifully, translating abstractions into sensuous, evocative subjects, turning history and science into symphonic prose poetry … To read Figuring is to be immersed in a gloriously ambitious symphony of ideas that segues effortlessly * * Guardian * *
Ambitious, challenging and somewhat category-defying * * New York Times * *
I can’t pull myself away from Maria Popova’s mesmerising new book Figuring … With glorious writing, storytelling, gems of insight and unique literary range, she tenderly brings to life celebrated scientists and artists we always thought we knew but really didn’t, and illuminates the fine threads that connect us all. I’m diving back in! – DIANE ACKERMAN
These chapters on Dickinson are among the most compelling biographical pages I have ever read, rendering me incapable of closing the book … The final chapters on Rachel Carson were so moving that I cried for thirty-odd pages * * Irish Times * *
Maria Popova
Maria Popova thinks and writes about our search for meaning – sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She has written some very long books (Figuring and Traversal) and some very short books (The Snail with the Right Heart and The Coziest Place on the Moon), and her show The Universe in Verse – a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry – has also become a book the length of a day on Saturn.
Returns
This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.