New Book :: Stone Breaker
Stone Breaker: The Poet James Percival and the Beginning of Geology in New England by Kathleen L. Housely
Wesleyan University Press, January 2023
Stone Breaker by Kathleen L. Housely is an in-depth, accessible biography of a true American polymath, James Gates Percival. A poet, linguist, and unstable savant, Percival was also a brilliant geologist who walked thousands of miles crisscrossing first Connecticut and then Wisconsin to lay the foundation for the work of generations of Earth scientists. Exploring the confluences of literature, art, and geology, Housley reveals how one of most famous poets of the 1820s became a renowned geologist with his groundbreaking 1843 work Report on the Geology of the State of Connecticut. The book includes historic photographs and paintings of the Connecticut landscape.
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