Short Nonfiction Collection, Vol. 072

A curious cabinet of wonders from the 18th and 19th centuries, this collection gathers twenty disparate voices united only by their willingness to wrestle with the world as they found it. Here Audubon recounts the 1812 New Madrid earthquake in prose that still quakes with terror, while elsewhere luminous plants and the spectrascope reveal the hidden poetry of science. The biographical sketches trace two men who reshaped seafaring: Robert Fulton, the famous inventor, and Thomas Andrews, the quieter shipbuilder whose name would become immortal for different reasons. Interspersed are essays that probe human weakness and folly, from the psychology of bashfulness to the calculating arts of scandal. Two murder trials from different centuries offer stark portraits of justice in motion. Travel writing transports readers to ancient Rome, the mosaics of Ravenna, and the frozen reaches of medieval Northern Europe. The result is a time capsule of curiosity: earnest, occasionally bizarre, and utterly alive to the variety of human enterprise.