EBOOK
Stone Breaker
The Poet James Gates Percival and the Beginning of Geology in New England
Kathleen L. HousleySeries: Driftless Connecticut & Garnet Books(0)
About
“Stone Breaker” 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, Kathleen L. Housley reveals how one of most famous poets of the 1820's became a renowned geologist with his groundbreaking 1843 work Report on the Geology of the State of Connecticut. 35 color images include historic photographs and paintings of the Connecticut landscape.
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Reviews
""Stone Breaker is, like its subject, a deeply layered book that situates Percival at a time of enormous upheaval in science, religion and industry. Through most of Percival's life, most people of intelligence still believed the world was 6,000 years old. College students were then drilled in Greek, latin, ecclesiastical history, theology, geometry, ancient history, logic, rhetoric and ethics-and
Tracey O'Shaughnessy
"Stone Breaker is an accounting of a life that is as remarkable and messy as the young nation in which [James Gate] Percival lived - his experience offers an interesting window into the overlapping worlds of science, literature, industry, mining, and medicine in the early American republic."
Lily Santoro
"In Stone Breaker Housley has done an exceptionally nice job of remind- ing us of how important to Percival and his work his native Connecticut always was. Especially welcome is her portfolio of images, most of them in color, reproducing the landscape paintings of Percival's fellow Kensington native Nelson Augustus Moore (1824-1902), many out of view in private hands today."
Wayne Franklin