Telegraph: Best Science Books of 2015

���Andrea Wulf gives a portrait of the age's greatest botanist, Alexander von Humboldt in ���The Invention of Nature���. Humboldt was a German Romantic to his toes: a friend of Goethe, follower of Kant and confidant of Schiller. His epic journeys across South America made him a celebrity, and his masterpiece, Cosmos, introduced the idea of nature as a teeming, thriving whole to his age. Humboldt's vision became the inspiration for Darwin and a whole generation of American Romantics, including Thoreau and Poe. Humboldt, like Einstein, breathed life into Kant's transcendental unity. We still live in the world they imagined, even if few of us comprehend it.���

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