"Holmes's enthralling book itself exemplifies those qualities fostered by a scientific culture:

"the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid butquestingbelief in a future for the globe." The Washington Post

"In this big two-hearted river of a book, the twin energies of scientific curiosity and poetic invention pulsate on every page." -The New York Times Book Review

"The Age of Wonderis the long-awaited fermentation of the author's knowledge of the Romantic poets and his lifelong fascination with science." -The Economist

"Holmes, the biographer of Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley, has a firm grip on science in

"The Age of Wonder" and a fluency in drawing the connections to literature and religion."
         -- Chemical and Engineering News

"Gives us . . . a new model for scientific exploration and poetic expression in the Romantic period. Informative and invigorating, generous and beguiling, it is, indeed, wonderful." -The Guardian

"The most flat-out fascinating book so far this year…. Holmes' account of experimental science at the end of 1700s is beyond riveting."Les Grossman,Time Magazine

"Holmes is certainly the man to undertake this intellectual salvage operation…Ambitious…Eloquent." Wall Street Journal

"Holmes pursues his many-chambered nautilus of a tale with energy and great rigor, unearthing many lives and assembling remnant shards of biography, history, science, and literary criticism." -Christian Science Monitor

"What's superlative about

"The Age of Wonder" is that Holmes, author of vivid biographies of Shelley and Coleridge, takes the air out of the terms

"subjectivity" and

"objectivity" and reveals the ways in which the artists were as enveloped in science as the men and women in the labs around them. In a harmony of scientific and artistic sensibilities, he shows, the Romantics tapped the marvels of nature and sounded the infinite benefits of science. It's a song, if we can hear it, that can transform us today." -Salon

"For Holmes to bring those people back to life is a great achievement…this is the finest history of science book I've come across." -Physics Today

"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." -CNNmoney.com

"What Holmes has given us with this account of the Romantic scientists is, curiously enough, a thrilling new way to interpret the poets of the era. To bring new light to such a widely read groupand from the angle least expected, that of rigorous scientific studyis Holmes's considerable gift." -Poetry Foundation

"It was a singular time, and this is a singular book." -Fortune Magazine

"[An] amazingly ambitious, buoyant new fusion of history, art, science, philosophy, and biography . . . . Holmes's excitement at fusing long-familiar events and personages into something startlingly new is not unlike the exuberance of the age that animates his groundbreaking book." -Janet Maslin,The New York Times

"The Romantics gave us many of our notions of how science is done, which makes the subject of this book-even leaving aside the brilliance with which much of it is told-significant beyond its importance as intellectual history." American Scholar

"I've been fascinated by a new book,The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes. He talks about how scientists and poets were very much aligned in the Age of Enlightenment, around 1800. Coleridge, Byron and Shelley were all interested in scientific progress. What was discovered, whether in labs or in the cliffs of Tahiti