Top 10 books about unlikely revolutionaries

Andrea Wulf is an award–winning author of seven acclaimed books, including the Founding Gardeners and The Invention of Nature which were both on the New York Times Best Seller List. She has written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, the LA Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian and many others.

Her latest book is Magnificent Rebels. The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.

At the Guardian Wulf tagged ten "fiction and non–fiction books" with "'heroes' [who] are all unlikely revolutionaries." One title on the list:

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

This is a fascinating account of a period (roughly from Cook’s Endeavour and Charles Darwin’s Beagle voyage) that brought together science and poetry, rationalism and emotion, meticulous observation and imagination – all united by the notion of “wonder”. The revolutionaries here are astronomers, botanists, chemists, explorers and poets – and together they launched what Holmes calls “a revolution in Romantic science”. It’s also an evocative reminder how much this sense of wonder has been erased from science today.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue