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In Every Living Thing, Jason Roberts traces the intertwined lives of two eighteenth-century naturalists who set out to name all of life on Earth: Carl Linnaeus in Sweden and Georges-Louis de Buffon in France. Linnaeus sought to impose order and hierarchy, giving us the terms mammal, primate, and Homo sapiens. Buffon, by contrast, saw nature as restless and ever-evolving. Their rivalry helped shape the birth of modern biology and continues to influence how we perceive and classify the living world.
We first discovered this book in the shop of Berlin’s Museum of Natural History. Once named for Alexander von Humboldt—the city’s great naturalist and explorer whose Kosmos sought to unite all forms of knowledge—the museum felt like the perfect setting for this story. Beneath its vast dinosaur skeletons, Every Living Thing seemed right at home: a reminder that the urge to name, order, and understand the world is as much about wonder as it is about power.
Roberts writes with clarity and verve, transforming scientific history into a suspenseful human drama. Linnaeus and Buffon emerge as vivid, complex figures: products of their age and participants in a wider European project to name, claim, and control knowledge about the natural world as exploration and colonization expanded.
About the Author:
Jason Roberts is the author of A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler. His writing has also appeared in McSweeney’s and The Believer.
Publisher: Random House, 2025
Format: Softcover, 432 pages
Dimensions: 5 in x 8 in (13 cm x 20 cm)
Condition: New
In Every Living Thing, Jason Roberts traces the intertwined lives of two eighteenth-century naturalists who set out to name all of life on Earth: Carl Linnaeus in Sweden and Georges-Louis de Buffon in France. Linnaeus sought to impose order and hierarchy, giving us the terms mammal, primate, and Homo sapiens. Buffon, by contrast, saw nature as restless and ever-evolving. Their rivalry helped shape the birth of modern biology and continues to influence how we perceive and classify the living world.
We first discovered this book in the shop of Berlin’s Museum of Natural History. Once named for Alexander von Humboldt—the city’s great naturalist and explorer whose Kosmos sought to unite all forms of knowledge—the museum felt like the perfect setting for this story. Beneath its vast dinosaur skeletons, Every Living Thing seemed right at home: a reminder that the urge to name, order, and understand the world is as much about wonder as it is about power.
Roberts writes with clarity and verve, transforming scientific history into a suspenseful human drama. Linnaeus and Buffon emerge as vivid, complex figures: products of their age and participants in a wider European project to name, claim, and control knowledge about the natural world as exploration and colonization expanded.
About the Author:
Jason Roberts is the author of A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler. His writing has also appeared in McSweeney’s and The Believer.
Publisher: Random House, 2025
Format: Softcover, 432 pages
Dimensions: 5 in x 8 in (13 cm x 20 cm)
Condition: New