Traversal

Traversal - Hardcover

$36.00
$36.00
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Traversal
  • Traversal
Traversal - Hardcover

Traversal - Hardcover

by Maria Popova
$36.00
$36.00

Book Overview

From the Marginalian creator and bestselling author Maria Popova, a bold exploration of what makes a meaningful life.

What is life?

What is death?

What makes a body a person?

What makes a planet a world?

In Traversal, Maria Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with the bewilderment of being alive--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, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, Alfred Wegener, Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Woven throughout their stories are other threads--the first global scientific collaboration, the Irish potato famine, the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue--to make the tapestry of meaning more elaborate yet clearer as the book advances, converging on the ultimate question of what makes life alive and worth living.

By turns epic and intimate--as concerned with the physical laws binding atoms into molecules as with the psychic forces binding us to one another--Traversal explores the universe between cells and souls to reveal the world, and our lives, in a dazzling new light.
ISBN9780374616410
Author Maria Popova
PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
GenreBiography and Education
FormatHardcover
PublishedFebruary 2026
LanguageENG- English
Pages608
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Biography & Autobiography Nonfiction Science

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More by Maria Popova

Traversal

Traversal - Hardcover

Traversal - Hardcover

By Maria Popova

About Maria Popova

MARIA POPOVA is a reader and a writer, and writes about what she reads on Brain Pickings (brainpickings.org), which is included in the Library of Congress's permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She hosts The Universe in Verse--an annual celebration of science through poetry--at the interdisciplinary cultural center Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. She grew up in Bulgaria immersed in music and mathematics.

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