Traversal

In Traversal, her startling and moving new book, 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 legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, Alfred Wagener, Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Woven throughout their stories are other threads—the world's first global scientific collaboration, the Irish potato famine, the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue—to make the tapestry of meaning more elaborate yet more clarifying as the book advances, converging on the ultimate question of what makes life alive and worth living.By turns epic and intimate—as concerned with the physical laws binding atoms into molecules as with the psychic forces binding us to each other—Traversal explores the universe between cells and souls to reveal the world, and our lives, in a dazzling new light.

Maria Popova is the creator of The Marginalian--a wide-ranging record of the search for meaning, founded in 2006 and included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. Her books and projects include Figuring, An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, and The Universe in Verse.