The Race to Measure the Heavens

Chasing Venus

The fascinating story of the world's first international scientific collaboration.

Andrea Wulf's story of the chase is an enthralling, nail-biting thriller and will undoubtedly prove one of the non-fiction books of the year. Even if you fail to see the Transit, don't miss this wonderful book

A fine example of scientific storytelling about astronomers of the Enlightenment observing the transit of Venus ... narrated with elegant expertise.

Historian Andrea Wulf’s Chasing Venus is beautifully paced, alternating between expe&shy;ditions, with lush descriptions of the often arduous journeys involved.

[a] truly excellent book…Andrea Wulf tell[s] the rip-roaring tales of numerous expeditions that set off around the globe to observe the Venusian transit of 1761…[She] communicate[s] the verve and energy – not to mention the perilous nature – of the expeditions.

It charts the story of a truly international effort; to not only observe the transit ... but to present the real quest that was to finally determine the distance between the Earth and the Sun ... [an] outstanding book! It's the book of the year so far – do not miss it!

Andrea Wulf’s immaculately researched book describes the endeavours of the early scientific community to observe the transit around the world…an absorbing…exciting yarn.

Replete with meticulous detail, delightful illustrations and a cast of very familiar names from world history, Chasing Venus is an eminently readable account of humanity’s effort to chart the heavens. At once an exhilarating adventure, a tale of personal obsession, a tragedy and a detailed history of astronomical endeavour, Wulf’s latest work is a fascinating read.

The result is a human story, and it’s worth reading as a rallying call to humanity’s quest to explore the universe simple for the sake of it.

Chasing Venus is the entertaining tale of the expeditions that set off across the globe to use a transit of Venus to gain the first true measure of the size of the Solar System…captures the spirit of adventure and the wonder at mankind’s new-found ability to understand the world around it… a pleasure to read from beginning to end.

[A] thrilling, stirring tale, very well told, of global cooperation, and how the passion for Enlightenment triumphed against enormous odds.

[a] thrilling book…an absorbing, even exciting yarn

On two days in 1761 and 1769 hundreds of astronomers pointed their telescopes towards the skies to observe a rare astronomical event: the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. 
 
United by this momentous occasion, scientists from around the globe came together to answer the essential question: how can the universe be measured? In Chasing Venus Andrea Wulf paints a vivid portrait of the rivalries, triumphs and misfortunes that befell these men, along with their passion and determination to succeed. This extraordinary book tells their story and how one single event prompted the first international scientific collaboration.

How the Revolutionary Generation created an American Eden

The Founding Gardeners

The New York Times bestseller - a unique portrait of the founding fathers, exploring how their passion for gardens and nature influenced the birth of the American nation.

EXCELLENT... Wulf writes enthrallingly. Wonderfully illuminating and readable

ENGROSSING... excellent ... fascinating... a timely and passionate book

SUPERB...this book will fascinate anyone interested in gardening, agriculture or American history.

WONDERFULLY ENGAGING... Her knack for description is marvelous

A GREAT ACHIEVEMENT... Excellent [and] riveting

FASCINATING ... this is a highly enjoyable and thought-provoking book.

ILLUMINATING AND ENGROSSING ... eloquent and revelatory

FASCINATING ... genuinely illuminating, illustrated with a wealth of compelling detail

A follow-up to Andrea Wulf's award-winning and critically acclaimed history of British gardening, this is the story of how George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and James Madison's passion for nature, plants, agriculture and gardens shaped the birth of America. 
 
Through a series of vignettes spanning the Declaration of Independence to the death of Adams and Jefferson exactly fifty years to the day afterwards, these stories that weave the political, the personal and the botanical and are in turns funny, fascinating and moving. The Founding Gardeners shows that it is impossible to understand these visionary men and the American nation without considering their love of gardening.

Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession

The Brother Gardeners

A wonderfully readable investigation of the origins of the modern garden in 18th-century England. Popular history at its finest.

This absorbing and delightful book about 18th-century botanists stands out among histories of plant hunting ... Works superbly

Rounded, generous and exhaustively researched ... She is very adept at telling a good story, and in the history and origins of gardening she has found the perfect vehicle ... An excellent, hugely entertaining and instructive tale, and Wulf tells it very well

Wondrous ... I have learned so much from her book

Engrossing ... A gripping story, told here with grace and aplomb

Fabulous ... What an incredible account of an amazing century

A wondrous telling of the history of the very English love affair with gardens and growing things

The Brother Gardeners is a delightful book. It brings the story of 18th-century gardening to life in a remarkably vivid way, and sheds new light on the personality clashes and prejudices which lay at the root of the Georgians' passion for plants

The Brother Gardeners were a group of men involved in the 18th-century quest for new plants, at a fascinating period in garden history. Andrea Wulf brings their personalities vividly to life in her thoroughly researched and lively account.

Rosie Atkins, Curator, Chelsea Physic Garden

Immaculately written and researched, this book brings to life the dramas and dangers of eighteenth-century plant collecting

[An] engrossing history of botanical obsession in England in the 18th century ... The author has a good eye for interesting detail and a fine sense of literary economy

A 'biography' of the quintessential English garden, taking in Captain Cook, Carl Linnaeus, and the simultaneous rise of the British Empire and flower arranging - a delightful look at horticultural history

As Wulf triumphantly shows, plants and gardens reveal a wider view of the forces that shape society ... An antidote to dry garden history; rarely has the story of English plants been told with such vigour, and such fun

The best book this year is The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession

Andrea Wulf has written a wonderful book, using a clutch of fascinating men to remind us the British Empire was once as much about white pine and Camellia japonica as it was about guns and steel ... enthralling story ... brilliantly readable book

One January morning in 1734, cloth merchant Peter Collinson hurried down to the docks at London's Custom House to collect cargo just arrived from John Bartram in the American colonies. But it was not bales of cotton that awaited him, but plants and seeds... 
 
Over the next forty years, Bartram would send hundreds of American species to England, where Collinson was one of a handful of men who would foster a national obsession and change the gardens of Britain forever: Philip Miller, author of the bestselling Gardeners Dictionary; the Swede Carl Linnaeus, whose standardised botanical nomenclature popularised botany; the botanist-adventurer Joseph Banks and his colleague Daniel Solander who both explored the strange flora of Tahiti and Australia on Captain Cook's Endeavour. 
 
This is the story of these men - friends, rivals, enemies, united by a passion for plants. Set against the backdrop of the emerging empire and the uncharted world beyond, The Brother Gardeners tells the story how Britain became a nation of gardeners.

Andrea Wulf

Andrea Wulf’s splendid biography rescues a dizzying life… [George Forster’s] was, frankly, an almost indecently interesting life story [that] provides the contented reader with uninterrupted fascination. How many lives encompass Maori tribes, Easter Island, Habsburg Austria and the French Revolution? Wulf, the author of acclaimed books on Alexander von Humboldt and the German Romantics, tells it all with the expected panache

A remarkable biography of a remarkable man. Wulf’s books are always horizon-expanding, but with this one she has excelled herself. I loved it

Unfailingly and inspiringly humane, George Forster is the overlooked tragic hero of the European Enlightenment. With her characteristic combination of scholarship and empathy, Andrea Wulf conjures the global range of his curiosity, and the poignant wilderness of his family life. This book is the memorial that he has long deserved

Vibrant ... invigorating ... George Forster is one of the most fascinating figures you have probably never heard of. The Traveller thrillingly revives the forgotten life of this “liberal thinker far ahead of his time." Wulf writes movingly about Forster’s unconventional marriage and his unconventional politics ... a lively new book that hums with her characteristic verve

A revelatory account of the life of George Forster, whose rejection of racial hierarchies stood out amongst his peers ... At a time when racism pervaded public opinion as well as the philosophical texts of luminaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, Forster moved brazenly to critique and correct them. How he was able to transcend the conventional beliefs of his day is the central question of Andrea Wulf’s new book. The richness of Wulf’s research .... injects a novelistic specificity into the scenes she reconstructs. It also allows the author to move from closely narrating the events of Forster’s life, as if perched on his shoulder, to inhabiting his interior voice as he experiences the world in real time

Fascinating ... a compelling life [that] presages our present-day attitudes to global difference, race and diversity. Wulf cleaves closely to archival verities, avoiding any tendency towards overembellished writing

Powerful ... exemplary ... Andrea Wulf draws on Forster’s publications and personal archives to reconstruct the trajectory of this remarkable, compellingly humane, figure

The singular and spectacular trajectory of George Forster [offers] an exemplary tour of the High Enlightenment .... In this lucent, affectionate retelling of his life, Andrea Wulf makes a convincing case for George as a thinker who has too long been dismissed or ignored ... There is a briskness to her prose and a simplicity to her structure ... She shares his sense of wonder at the beauty of emerald islands like Tahiti as well as his outrage at the violence perpetrated by the sailors who were taking part in what was clearly a colonial project ... An irresistible biography

Wulf’s beautifully written account of the voyage, following Forster’s captivating record, is carefully attentive to historical and cultural circumstances … Wulf tells Forster’s story with sympathy underpinned by detached analysis. As well as tracking him through libraries and archives, she followed his trail across Europe and the South Pacific, her travels adding depth to his striking impressions. Her text brings every scene to life, from Tahitian shores to London alleys, from the dusty library of Vilnius to the hectic streets of Paris ... an exhilarating work of historical imagination, recording the life of an extraordinary traveler, writer, and revolutionary figure with rare vitality and power

For vacationers and staycationers alike comes the saga of George Forster, the eighteenth-century German-British globetrotter whose life embodied seismic changes in travel, technology, and government. The acclaimed author of The Invention of Nature, Andrea Wulf brings erudition and flair to Forster’s peripatetic career as teenaged crewman on Captain Cook’s global voyage. He later studied the French Revolution up close and advocated for human rights as monarchies faltered and capitalism began its steady conquest of the world. Wulf pays overdue homage to an intellectual titan and forefather of linguistics and natural history

Arresting ... pacy ... a compelling case for that lately much-maligned form, the single-life biography. In Forster, one sees the Enlightenment arguing with itself: its empiricism turned against its own racism, its universalism turned against its tendency to restrict the scope of its own ideals ... Wulf’s methods are largely archival, but enlivened by the willingness to retrace her subject’s journeys without her turning the book into the story of her travels rather than Forster’s. Wulf is confident enough that the facts of such a life speak for themselves to avoid any tedious traffic in revisionary argument. She wants to remind us that Forster matters ... that one life, examined with the right attention, can contain its own world.

Award-winning historian Wulf draws on abundant archival sources to create a meticulously researched life of George Forster — Polish-born naturalist, ethnographer, explorer, and German revolutionary. Wulf amply restores his stature as a brilliant mind [in this] stirring, empathetic portrait

Andrea Wulf’s new book thrillingly resurrects the 18th-century polymath’s life story, recounting how he became famous by his early 20s as a traveler, scientist, and author who was ahead of his time in speaking out against racism and sexism ... Wulf came to know Forster’s mind so deeply that we follow his adventures “as if perched on his shoulder”

Drawing on Forster's letters and later writing. Wulf shows how his close, attentive engagement with the people he met led him to question the ideas of racial hierarchy common in Europe. His account ofthe voyage was strikingly humane and anti- racist for its time . Yet Forster's radicalism is more than historical curiosity. It is an early example of how travel, when approached with curiosity and humility, reshapes our understanding of others [and] can help to calibrate your moral compass. Deep hanging out with The Traveller is time well spent

The dauntless Andrea Wulf has gone adventuring, and returned with this enthralling account of young, nomadic George Forster. Her superb narrative shimmers with scholarly detail and magnificently sustains the “breathless exhilaration” of his journeys, his extraordinarily liberal and observant mind and the intense emotional drama of his life. A combination of panoramic travelogue and tender psychological study animated at every point by Wulf’s own travels and research, The Traveller is hypnotically successful and wonderfully restores George Forster as a major historical figure of early European Romanticism

As George Forster circumnavigates the globe, Wulf circumnavigates the Enlightenment mind in all its complexity, making for a doubly brilliant and breathtaking adventure

Andrea Wulf belongs to the small, splendid canon of writers unafraid to render fact with feeling. The Traveller is a work of devotion and rigor celebrating a man's courage to look past the horizon of his era's assumptions

Award-winning historian Wulf draws on abundant archival sources to create a meticulously researched life of George Forster (1754-94)—Polish-born naturalist, ethnographer, explorer, and German revolutionary ... Wulf amply restores his stature as a brilliant mind ... A stirring, empathetic portrait

Transfixing ... Through extensive research, adept synthesis, empathy, and artistry, Wulf fully inhabits Forster’s life ... Readers will be deeply moved by Wulf's spirited honoring of this perpetual outsider and galvanizing writer, “original thinker and a man of enormous compassion”

The Revolutionary Life of George Forster and his Search for Humanity

George Forster was a man out of time: he journeyed to the far reaches of the known world and challenged the worldviews of eighteenth-century Europe with radical ideas about equality and freedom. Celebrated during his lifetime, he knew Goethe, Benjamin Franklin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Alexander von Humboldt but has since been largely forgotten by history. 
 
The Traveller seeks to restore Forster as one of the great visionaries of his era. At the age of seventeen he joined Captain Cook’s second voyage – an exploration of vast contrasts from the icy world of Antarctica to the tropical islands of the South Pacific. A brilliant mind driven by boundless curiosity, he studied the diverse nature, people and cultures he encountered and came back imbued with a deep belief in the equality of races. On his return he was feted in England, France, Germany and Poland, using his fame to advocate for freedom and human rights and against empire, racism and slavery. He admired strong and educated women and was proud to have daughters. The book traces how – inspired by the French Revolution – he became a leader of the short-lived Republic of Mainz and was eventually forced into exile in Paris during the Reign of Terror. 
 
Following in Forster’s footsteps from Europe to Tahiti, and drawing on a wealth of correspondence mostly unpublished in English, Andrea Wulf paints a portrait of a remarkable, passionate figure unbound by place, people or establishment. She vividly conveys his extraordinary quest to find what connects us rather than what sets us apart.

Andrea Wulf

Praise for The Traveller

Andrea Wulf’s splendid biography rescues a dizzying life… [George Forster’s] was, frankly, an almost indecently interesting life story [that] provides the contented reader with uninterrupted fascination.< ...

A remarkable biography of a remarkable man. Wulf’s books are always horizon-expanding, but with this one she has excelled herself. I loved it

Unfailingly and inspiringly humane, George Forster is the overlooked tragic hero of the European Enlightenment. With her characteristic combination of scholarship and empathy, Andrea Wulf conjures the glob ...

Andrea Wulf’s splendid biography rescues a dizzying life… [George Forster’s] was, frankly, an almost indecently interesting life story [that] provides the contented reader with uninterrupted fascination.< ...

A remarkable biography of a remarkable man. Wulf’s books are always horizon-expanding, but with this one she has excelled herself. I loved it

Unfailingly and inspiringly humane, George Forster is the overlooked tragic hero of the European Enlightenment. With her characteristic combination of scholarship and empathy, Andrea Wulf conjures the glob ...

Andrea Wulf’s splendid biography rescues a dizzying life… [George Forster’s] was, frankly, an almost indecently interesting life story [that] provides the contented reader with uninterrupted fascination.< ...

A remarkable biography of a remarkable man. Wulf’s books are always horizon-expanding, but with this one she has excelled herself. I loved it

Unfailingly and inspiringly humane, George Forster is the overlooked tragic hero of the European Enlightenment. With her characteristic combination of scholarship and empathy, Andrea Wulf conjures the glob ...

Books by Andrea Wulf

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