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

"Jason Roberts’ Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life is a dual biography of the 18th-century naturalists Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon. The Pulitzer jury described it as a “beautifully written” account of these great scientists who “devoted their lives to identifying and describing nature’s secrets, and who continue to influence how we understand the world.” In an interview with El Pais , the author said that he initially planned a book about the heroes of the Enlightenment, but the more he dug into it, the more he realised those heroes were “not very Enlightened.” The Linnean taxonomical system “became this form of cultural colonialism,” he explained, “because you were able to wipe the slate clean and award a name to a species.” Buffon’s approach was ridiculed in his time, but he “was the first person to actually say that we are living in the era of humans, that humans are permanently changing the global climate… he knew quite well that the period of the time wasn’t ready for some of his ideas.”"