"By recovering the excitement of Humboldtian explorations and travel experiences, Walls wins back Humboldt for the 21st century. Through her account, he joins forces with present-day heroes such as Edward O. Wilson and his Cosmos of a sort, Consilience, all of them reorienting and transforming disciplines and divisions that threaten ’to leach the poetry out of our technologically driven lives.’ Walls reclaims for the present a man whose personality and work had a formative influence on the cultural landscape of antebellum America and whose legacy may to good effect be used in addressing current affairs. I recommend The Passage to Cosmos as a fine piece of Humboldt scholarship, a heartfelt plea for environmental holism, and an enjoyable read."

Nicolaas A. Rupke | Science

"Not the least of the qualities of Dassow Walls’ erudite and wide-ranging narrative is that she enables us to understand something of the man’s genius and polymathic range. Humboldt’s fundamental assumption, she tells us, was that neither humans nor nature could be understood in isolation."—Jeremy Jennings, Times Higher Education

 

Jeremy Jennings | Times Higher Education

"Walls’s masterly prose makes this book an entertaining as well as enlightening look into the life, works, and impact on American thought of one of the giants of 19th-century intellect."—Choice

Choice

“The Passage to Cosmos is as wide-ranging, as integrative, as creative, and as suggestive, as the man of science who is at its center. . . . In Walls, Humboldt has found a reader whose originality, diligence, curiosity, and moral passion resembles his own. Walls’s book gives the reader a vivid sense of why this fertile polymath meant so much to so many people, how he seemed to provide a kind of key to all knowledge. She also comes to grips with the question of why his influence faded. But most of all, she makes a case for the value of recovering his way of knowing for the contemporary world, and the ways in which some of the most advanced thinkers are only now rediscovering insights that Humboldt proclaimed almost two centuries ago.”

John Burt, Brandeis University | Wordsworth Circle