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Traversal

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Traversal

Written by: Maria Popova
Narrated by: Natascha McElhone
Free with 30-day trial

₹199.00 per month after 30-day trial. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for ₹715.63

Buy Now for ₹715.63

In Traversal, Maria Popova traverses the border between life and death, chance and choice, chemistry and consciousness: what makes a body a person? What makes a planet a world? How do we safeguard our love of truth from our lust for power? What slakes our longings and what redeems our losses?

Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with these questions – our telescopes and our treatises, our postulates and our poems – through the intertwined lives, loves and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright. Woven throughout their stories are other threads – the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue – which come together to create a rich tapestry of life’s meaning; exploring what it is that makes life alive and worth living.

By turns epic and intimate, Traversal explores the universe between cells and souls to reveal the world, and our lives, in a dazzling new

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Critic Reviews

"Praise for Maria Popova's Figuring: A highly original survey of life, love and creativity; an intellectual odyssey that challenges easy categorisation . . . Popova writes beautifully, translating abstractions into sensuous, evocative subjects, turning history and science into symphonic prose poetry . . . To read Figuring is to be immersed in a gloriously ambitious symphony of ideas that segues effortlessly"
"Ambitious, challenging and somewhat category-defying"
"I can’t pull myself away from Maria Popova's mesmerising new book Figuring . . . With glorious writing, storytelling, gems of insight and unique literary range, she tenderly brings to life celebrated scientists and artists we always thought we knew but really didn't, and illuminates the fine threads that connect us all. I'm diving back in!" (DIANE ACKERMAN)
"These chapters on Dickinson are among the most compelling biographical pages I have ever read, rendering me incapable of closing the book . . . The final chapters on Rachel Carson were so moving that I cried for thirty-odd pages . . . When Popova quoted Carson on great books, “something that would raise you a little higher than you were yesterday, something that would make you willing and able for your part in the work of the world”, I knew that I had one such book in my hands"
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