Traversal

Maria Popova's Traversal explores the tools people use to make sense of the bewilderment of being alive, among them telescopes, treatises, postulates and poems. She does this through the intertwined lives, loves and legacies of visionaries, some celebrated and some sidelined by history. Many were born into the margins of their time and place and went on to write the future. They are Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, Alfred Wegener, Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. Other threads run through their stories: the first global scientific collaboration, the Irish potato famine, the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle and how nature creates the color blue. Together they form a tapestry whose meaning grows richer and clearer as the book advances, and the threads converge on the question of what makes life alive and worth living. The book moves between the epic and the intimate. It is as interested in the physical laws that bind atoms into molecules as in the psychic forces that bind people to one another, and it looks into the space between cells and souls. Popova is the writer behind The Marginalian, formerly called Brain Pickings, and the author of Figuring.