'The Age of Wonder' - Book Review
Frankenstein's monster and the discovery of the Milky Way were the result of scientists and poets exploring the universe together.
(Fortune Magazine) -- "On 13 April 1769, young Joseph Banks, official botanist to H.M. Bark Endeavour, first clapped eyes on the island of Tahiti." The opening words of Richard Holmes's "The Age of Wonder" couldn't be calmer, but the charge embedded within them ignited an era that merits his soaring title. It was a singular time, and this is a singular book.
Both book and era are set in motion by Banks. He was handsome, wealthy, and brilliant, and he financed scientific inquiry first as an individual, then for four decades as the president of the Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge. During the Romantic Era, Banks and his many protégés practiced a science like none known before, deconstructing the universe for the sheer thrill of discovery.
Astronomer William Herschel, chemist Humphry Davy, the doomed explorer Mungo Park, the ballooning Montgolfier brothers, and all the other members of Holmes's cast were infused with the ardent passions of the age every bit as fully as their more widely remembered literary counterparts.
Back then, the men of science and the men of literature were united in common cause. Holmes's book brackets a period in European history when poets engaged with science, and when scientists wrote poetry.
Among the former were Keats, Shelley, Byron, and especially the opium addict Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who argued about evolution and coined the word "psychosomatic." (He also scored cannabis from the botanically adept Joseph Banks.)
The most prolific of the poetizing scientists was Davy, whose verse heated up when he described his experiments with nitrous oxide ("my cheek with rosy blushes warm ... my eyes with sparkling luster filled"), but who got an even greater high from what he called the "sacred stream of science."
I have to say that at times that stream flows sluggishly with Holmes at the helm, and at more than a few points I was leafing ahead to find out what the next chapter was about. But his delight in his material is unmistakable.
A case in point: Holmes's descriptions of Banks' amatory encounters with Tahitian women are both ribald and droll. And for most of these thickly populated 469 pages, the author successfully conveys the ecstatic shiver that characterized the times.
One American scientist-diplomat living in France expressed that feeling well when he found himself discussing the early balloon flights. "Someone asked me -- what's the use of a balloon?" Benjamin Franklin said. "I replied -- what's the use of a newborn baby?" 
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