Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Traversal

Traversal

Popova, Maria

Hardcover

Biographies GeneralLiterary FiguresHistory & Philosophy of Science

Publisher Price: $36.00

ISBN10: 0374616418
ISBN13: 9780374616410
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: Feb 17 2026
Pages: 608
Weight: 1.80
Height: 2.02 Width: 6.35 Depth: 9.20
Language: English

From the Marginalian creator and bestselling author Maria Popova, a bold exploration of what makes a meaningful life.

What is life?

What is death?

What makes a body a person?

What makes a planet a world?

In Traversal, Maria Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with the bewilderment of being alive--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, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, Alfred Wegener, Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Woven throughout their stories are other threads--the first global scientific collaboration, the Irish potato famine, the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue--to make the tapestry of meaning more elaborate yet clearer as the book advances, converging on the ultimate question of what makes life alive and worth living.

By turns epic and intimate--as concerned with the physical laws binding atoms into molecules as with the psychic forces binding us to one another--Traversal explores the universe between cells and souls to reveal the world, and our lives, in a dazzling new light.

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