Every Living Thing
The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
An epic, extraordinary account of scientific rivalry and obsession in the quest to survey all of life on Earth—a competition "with continued repercussions for Western views of race. [This] vivid double biography is a passionate corrective." —The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice
"[A] vibrant scientific saga . . . at once important, outrageous, enlightening, entertaining, enduring and still evolving." —Dava Sobel, author of Longitude
In the eighteenth century, two men—exact contemporaries and polar opposites—dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster's flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France's royal garden, viewed life as a…
Available for Pre-Order
$29.00
June 10, 2025
Jason Roberts is a 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.
