Louis Agassiz (ePub)

Christoph Irmscher, professor of English at Indiana University, is editor of the Library of America's John James Audubon: Writings and Drawings and the author of Longfellow Redux, called "one of the most important books on Longfellow ever written" (Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club and editor of Inferno: The Longfellow Translation).

“In this evocative new biography . . . Irmscher is a richly descriptive writer with an eye for detail, the complexities and contradictions of character, and the workings of institutional and familial power structures. . . . This is a book not just about a man of science but also about a scientific culture in the making—warts and all.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“Compelling biography . . . A masterful portrait illuminating the tangled human dynamics of science.” —Booklist, starred review
 
“In Irmscher’s hands, Agassiz’s life and passions are embedded in the major intellectual ideas of his time. . . . The relationship between Agassiz and his second wife, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, the first president of Radcliffe College, is also fascinating.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“Christoph Irmscher’s elegant, beautifully written account does the essential task of setting the mysterious Agassiz in his full social and historical context, where we can both appreciate his gifts and see his flaws clearly. His portrayal of Elizabeth Agassiz and her contributions is brilliant, and his exploration of Agassiz’s stagnation, as the world turned without him, is both rigorous and poignant. Through the prism of Agassiz’s life, much of nineteenth-century culture gleams freshly.” —Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal
 
“A biography as exuberant as its brilliant but wrong-headed subject, the unforgettable forgotten celebrity scientist Louis Agassiz. Christoph Irmscher is in his element detailing the exploits of this larger-than-life antihero of the Age of Darwin, whose feats of discovery took him from the Swiss Alps to the Amazon jungle and made him Harvard’s reigning eminence for decades.” —Megan Marshall, author of The Peabody Sisters and