He lived during the turn of the century; the 17th/18th century that is! Born a wealthy man in Prussia, after his parents were gone and he had full control of his money he spent several years in exploring South America. He also traveled to North American and Siberia and never lost his curiosity and fascination with science and the natural world. He was trained as a mining engineer and eventually used his entire fortune in support of his scientific pursuits. Unusually for the time, he spoke out against slavery, the Spanish exploitation of the indigenous populations of South America, and he considered himself a "citizen of the world."
The book is fully illustrated, with colorful images of South American flora and fauna, as well as the mountains and volcanoes von Humboldt explored. The text is fairly dense, and also frequently veers into narrative/fictionalized dialogue, with seemed odd to me. There are some further reading and resource lists, but no index or comprehensive source notes. Ultimately, this is the kind of book readers would browse and then go to find more definite information on the subject.
However, I have a hard time seeing any of my young readers picking this up. The text is very dense and the pictures have an old-fashioned feel to them. Explorers from the 1800s are not exactly a topic in high demand, and I found it frustrating that the other people of the time were completely overlooked in the exaltation of von Humboldt. There is a brief chapter on his companion, who was imprisoned for years in South America and did basically all the same research as Humboldt, he just wasn't as charismatic (or wealthy).
Verdict: I found this personally interesting, and plan to locate and read some of von Humboldt's own works, but I don't think this would circulate much, if at all, in the average public library collection.
ISBN: 9781615196319; Published September 2019 by Experiment; Borrowed from another library in my consortium
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