FROM LOVE NOT FOR LOVE
BY MARIA POPOVA Traversal ( FSG ) broadens and deepens the questions raised in Figuring , the questions we live with: the relationship between chance and choice in becoming who we are, between chemistry and consciousness in being what we are, the tension between our love of truth and our lust for power, the restlessness of our longings and the redemption of our losses. Our various instruments of reckoning with these questions — telescopes and treatises, postulates and poems — are revealed in their power and limitation 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 Wegener , Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict , and Margaret Mead . Woven throughout their stories are other threads — the world’s first global scientific colla...