Every Living Thing by Jason Roberts

The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life Paperback PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • An epic, extraordinary account of scientific rivalry and obsession in the quest to survey all of life on Earth“[An] engaging and thought-provoking book, one focused on the theatrical politics and often deeply troubling science that shape our definitions of life on Earth.”—The New York Times“A fluent and engaging account of the eighteenth-century origins of Darwinism before Darwin.”—The Wall Street JournalWINNER OF THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD • A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEARIn 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 com