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In Search of Sir Thomas Browne: The Life and Afterlife of the Seventeenth Century's Most Inquiring Mind Audiobook
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Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) was an English writer, physician, and philosopher whose work has inspired everyone form Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf to Stephen Jay Gould.
In an intellectual adventure akin to Sarah Bakewell's book Montaigne, How To Live, Hugh Aldersey-Williams sets off not just to tell the story of Browne's life but also champion his skeptical nature and inquiring mind for our own age. Mixing botany, etymology, medicine, and literary history, Aldersey-Williams journeys in his hero's footsteps to introduce us to witches, zealots, natural wonders, and fabulous creatures of Browne's time and ours. He reveals how Browne's preoccupations—how to disabuse the credulous of their foolish beliefs, what to make of order in natures, how to unite science and religion—are relevant today. And he shows how Sir Thomas Browne himself remains, and Stephen Greenblatt has written, "unnervingly one of or most adventurous contemporaries."
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“This is just the kind of celebration Sir Thomas Browne needs and deserves: not a conventional biography but a meditation filled with intellectual curiosity, tolerance, humane observation, and gentle wit. It shows Browne as a man caught in the currents of his times while musing on timeless questions?and, like Aldersey-Williams, determined to weigh up the evidence without dogmatism, and to enjoy the richness of the world.”
— Philip Ball, editor, Nature
Quotes
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“Fascinating…[A] cleverly constructed and amusing book, on a subject deserving of fresh attention.”
— Wall Street Journal -
“A delightful portrait.”
— New York Times Book Review -
“A triumph. With humor, humility, and intelligent generosity, Aldersey-Williams brings Sir Thomas Browne splendidly to life, urns and all.”
— Financial Times (London) -
“Simon Vance is adept at balancing the author’s contemporary approach with Browne’s famously baroque style…For those who love the unique and obscure and odd, as Browne did, this title offers many pleasures. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
— AudioFile -
“An elegant, pleasantly obsessive study of a ‘life of tolerance, humour, serenity, and untiring curiosity.’”
— Kirkus Reviews -
“A wonderfully erratic, promenading book, in which we see how different, yet how similar we still are today to that most serene, most enigmatic science pioneer and literary master, Sir Thomas Browne, whose prose style is one of the highest peaks in English literature, according to Borges and to my humble self.”
— Javier Marías, author of A Heart So White -
“This is just the kind of celebration Sir Thomas Browne needs and deserves: not a conventional biography but a meditation filled with intellectual curiosity, tolerance, humane observation, and gentle wit. It shows Browne as a man caught in the currents of his times while musing on timeless questions―and, like Aldersey-Williams, determined to weigh up the evidence without dogmatism, and to enjoy the richness of the world.”
— Philip Ball, editor, Nature
Awards
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Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
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A New York Times bestseller
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About Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Hugh Aldersey-Williams graduated from Cambridge with a degree in natural sciences, majoring in chemistry. He has since written widely on both science and technology in newspapers and magazines ranging from Popular Science and New Scientist to the Independent, and the Guardian. He is the author of Anatomies, Periodic Tales, and The Most Beautiful Molecule, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He lives in London.
About Simon Vance
Simon Vance (a.k.a. Robert Whitfield) is an award-winning actor and narrator. He has earned more than fifty Earphones Awards and won the prestigious Audie Award for best narration thirteen times. He was named Booklist’s very first Voice of Choice in 2008 and has been named an AudioFile Golden Voice as well as an AudioFile Best Voice of 2009. He has narrated more than eight hundred audiobooks over almost thirty years, beginning when he was a radio newsreader for the BBC in London. He is also an actor who has appeared on both stage and television.