The Signature of All Things: Library Edition

Gilbert, Elizabeth

ISBN 10: 1482948745 ISBN 13: 9781482948745

Publisher: Blackstone Pub, 2013

Synopsis

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. Traces the multi-generational saga of the Whittaker family, whose progenitor makes a fortune in the quinine trade before his daughter, a gifted botanist, researches the mysteries of evolution while falling in love with an artist.

About this title

Review

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, October 2013: As a small girl, Elizabeth Gilbert scrawled her name in the most extraordinary book in her house: an original illustrated folio of Captain Cook’s voyages. Decades later, her parents discovered her signature and gave her the book, reigniting her passion for scientific exploration in the century leading up to Darwin’s theory of evolution. She became fascinated with the women—always wives or daughters of scientists—who made their own discoveries, in spite of the cultural constraints that kept them from true exploration. Her invented heroine, the insatiably curious Alma Whittaker, daughter of a scrappy botanical baron, spends most of her life confined to her family estate in Philadelphia, yearning for a life of greater passion and liberty. She channels her desires into botany, thrilling to the miniature universe of moss in the forests surrounding her house, developing a new taxonomy that becomes a theory encompassing all living things, parallel to Darwin’s. When she finally turns herself loose on the world, it’s to claim her place in a lineage of explorers. An earthy, elegant, deeply sensual novel of daring breadth and imagination, The Signature of All Things gives us the cosmos in the life of one woman, in her worlds within worlds. –Mari Malcolm

About the Author

Elizabeth Gilbert is an award-winning American writer of both fiction and nonfiction, named one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2008. Her books have been New York Times bestsellers, including the #1 New York Times bestseller list for Committed. Her short story collection, Pilgrims, received the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her novel, Stern Men, was a New York Times Notable Book. Her 2002 book, The Last American Man, was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is best known for her memoir Eat, Pray, Love, which has been published in more than thirty languages and was made into a film.

Edition details

• Publisher: Blackstone Pub
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1482948745
• ISBN 13: 9781482948745
• Binding: Preloaded Digital Audio Player
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 22