Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life

Books

An epic, extraordinary account of scientific rivalry and obsession in the quest to survey all of life on Earth-a competition whose consequences still reverberate today-from the bestselling author of A Sense of the World "[A] vibrant scientific saga . . . at once important, outrageous, enlightening, entertaining, enduring, and still evolving."-Dava Sobel, author of Longitude In the eighteenth century, two men-exact contemporaries and polar opposites-dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster's flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France's royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Each began his task believing it to be difficult but not impossible: How could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species-or as many could fit on Noah's Ark? Both fell far short of their goal, but in the ...