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Jason Roberts is a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer of fiction and nonfiction. His previous book, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler, was a national bestseller and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A contributor to McSweeney’s, The Believer, and other publications, he lives in Northern California.
“A skillfully told, ambitious-in-the-best-possible way tale about hubris, curiosity, rivalry, and deep, deep obsession. These two men’s impossible race to catalogue the entirety of the natural world winds up illuminating some of the best and worst stuff about being human.”—Jon Mooallem, author of This Is Chance! “Barely a dozen letters of the alphabet suffice to categorize every star in the cosmos, but when it comes to naming and classifying living things, the job gets more complicated. As Jason Roberts reveals in this vibrant scientific saga, taxonomists take up their mission with a mix of insight and foresight, colored by their moment in history, not to mention their foibles, their vanity, and their all-too-human prejudices. The thousands of definitive two-part labels given to plants and animals since the eighteenth century tell a story at once important, outrageous, enlightening, entertaining, enduring, and still evolving.”—Dava Sobel, author of Longitude
