Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life

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 Journal WINNER OF THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD - A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR In 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 complexities. Each began his task believing it t