Andrea Wulf

So while other children sit at school, young George Forster gallops with fierce Cossacks along the Volga River and across the Russian Steppe, and it's really the beginning of his life as a traveler.

The writer Andrea Wulf has an abiding interest in visionary thinkers from history, in the exceptional apples who do fall far from the tree, who take leave of their roots to find new ways of seeing and being.

George Forster is one of these.

In this episode, Andrea Wulf provides a foretaste of her book The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris.

Her subject, who doesn't quite make it to age 40, begins his career at the age of 10 as a botanist.

N- no child labor laws in those days, of course.

And he sees this wonder in the big and in the small equally.

So not one is better than the other.

Each week, we have an interview with one of the shortlisted candidates.

One of them will go on to join a list of winners that include Stephen Hawking and Stephen Jay Gould, Andrea Wulf, and Caroline Criado Perez.

This week, before our final interview, we spoke to another of those past winners and a former judge.

We asked Bill Bryson why he holds the prize in such affection.

A very interesting figure who we've talked about a good bit on the show before.

I think one of the main contexts was, uh, in a, in a ... summer reading episode we did years ago where I was talking about a, a great biography of him by Andrea Wulf called, um, The Invention of Nature.

Hmm.

Uh, Von Humboldt was important in helping to move the burgeoning natural sciences of the 19th century away from this long-held Western view of nature as a fixed order of discrete entities with eternal roles defined by providence, and to replace that with a view, uh, of nature as a complex and changeable web of relationships, these interdependencies that are constantly in flux.

Mm-hmm

... by Andrea Wulf, W-U-L-F.

Yep.

And it is about the life of Alexander von Humboldt who used to be, was, uh, in the time of, uh, Goethe and on the other side of the ocean Thomas Jefferson, James Madison.