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Traversal
Brief Description
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...
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Format: Hardback
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See moreFrom the Marginalian creator and bestselling author Maria Popova, a bold exploration of what makes a meaningful life
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Description
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 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.
Woven throughout their stories are other threads - the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue - which come together to create a rich tapestry of life's meaning; exploring what it is that makes life alive and worth living.
By turns epic and intimate, Traversal explores the universe between cells and souls to reveal the world, and our lives, in a dazzling new light.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781837265619
Publisher: Canongate Books
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 12 March 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Canongate Books
Edition: Main
Audience: General / adult, Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 48.0mm
Width: 159.0mm
Height: 240.0mm
Weight: 867g
Pages: 608
About the Author
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.
themarginalian.org
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Figuring
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...Paperback$3600Elsewhere:$3999Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
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