Product Description

Measuring the World marks the debut of a glorious new talent on the international scene. Young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann’s brilliant comic novel revolves around the meeting of two colossal geniuses of the Enlightenment.Late in the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. One of them, the aristocratic naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, negotiates jungles, voyages down the Orinoco River, tastes poisons, climbs the highest mountain known to man, counts head lice, and explores and measures every cave and hill he comes across. The other, the reclusive and barely socialized mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, can prove that space is curved without leaving his home. Terrifyingly famous and wildly eccentric, these two polar opposites finally meet in Berlin in 1828, and are immediately embroiled in the turmoil of the post-Napolean world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #148913 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-09
• Released on: 2007-10-09
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.00" h x .58" w x 5.18" l, .44 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Strong stays out of the way of Kehlmann's dry, sardonic humor, letting the words tell the jokes, rather than their teller. The German author's debut novel, an enormous success in Europe, turns the scientific exploits of the legendary scientists Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss into a rollicking buddy picture framed by racing scientific and political change. Strong avoids German accents or overly broad characterizations in favor of the author's Enlightenment-fueled spirit of intellectual absorption and intense dedication, and a more modern sense of subtle humorous intent. Strong's voice, so modern and American in its flat, frictionless flow, balances the competing elements of Kehlmann's novel, offering a reading at once humorous and measured, sweet and filling.
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From AudioFile
Daniel Kehlmann's novel tells two interrelated stories based on real-life figures. Explorer Alexander von Humboldt travels South America's Orinoco basin, and German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss studies the world through calculation and observation. Rider Strong brings excitement and drama to both stories--in Humboldt's case, an adventure story; in Gauss's case, a tale of personal loss as he copes with the deaths of his wife and child. Strong brings touches of humor as well, as he reads anecdotes about Humboldt's hallucinations atop a mountain and Gauss's mathematical thoughts on his wedding night. Strong's narration brings a human touch to a larger-than-life story of scientific discovery and politics. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
*Starred Review* In 1828, scientist-explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) summons the great mathematician Carl Gauss (1777-1855) to join his party to Berlin, where he is to be feted before embarking on an expedition across Russia to the Urals. The perpetually testy Gauss, whose great trial in life is that everyone else thinks so slowly, which makes virtually any kind of human interaction infuriatingly boring for him (though he does fancy a fine young figure), would go back to sleep, but his wife, Minna, whom he barely tolerates, rousts him out and gets him on the road with youngest son Eugen. They no sooner arrive at Humboldt's mansion than Kehlmann diverges to recap his two principals' lives and careers in chapters alternately concerned with globe-trotting aristocrat Humboldt and genius-from-the-gutter Gauss, who willingly leaves home only to earn a living and escape Minna. The uncomfortable humor of being, in Gauss' case, too brilliant (he frequently bemoans having to live before the innovations he foresees can be constructed or even understood); in Humboldt's, too focused (he scrupulously abjures whole theaters of human experience to concentrate on measuring), suffuses Kehlmann's heady historical novel, which may especially delight science-fiction connoisseurs. Ray Olson
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