As someone who enjoys a good nonfiction book, I will admit my knowledge of “older” history is not great so I was excited to see a book on more of the history of science. If I had known anything previously on the rivalry of Buffon and Linnaeus, i completely lost it. I enjoyed how this book brought their stories together and compared and contrasted them! The book is well written and is set up in a way that is very story like and not boring history.

I received a free advanced copy of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Gonna be honest, I dramatically misread the vibes of this book. I thought I was getting into a fantasy-fiction novel. That is NOT what this is, but I was pleasantly surprised. Once I got over the initial shock and kept reading, I found this book easy to comprehend. It was more entertaining than any history book I've read. And I feel like I learned a lot. If you're interested in this subject, I highly suggest this book.

Every Living Thing
Jason Roberts
Random House (March 12, 2024)
Publisher's address
9781984855206, $35.00

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/155625/every-living-thing-by-jason-roberts/

Every Living Thing is a wonderful account of the two men in a competition of their own making to name every living creature on earth. They were nearly exactly contemporaries, being born only months apart—Carl Linnaeus, born may 1707, while Buffon was born in September 1707—yet polar opposites in their approach to life. Though neither were particularly good students, they had well-functioning minds that could focus intently.

Linneaus (whose system ended up “winning”) was poor, short, and not very good looking. He started training to be a pastor but got sidetracked into botany. To support his botany habits, he sought an ersatz medical degree and leveraged himself into being the man who treated all of Swedish military’s syphilis cases. He felt that living things should be labeled in tight little boxes of similar animals as observed by man, and some of his observations led to rather bizarre couplings and included animals such as the hydra (which he debunked as being a real animal).

In the other corner, tall, good looking, wealthy Georges-Louis de Buffon, who kept the French royal gardens felt that life was too complex to categorize in ill-fitting boxes and favored a more dynamic approach. He built a forest around his home and devised experiments to see which woods responded best to what sort of treatment. His thinking was quite advanced for the time as he co-invented some mathematical theories and worked with probability. Charles Darwin, a century later had to admit that Buffon’s theories of evolution were much like Darwin’s own.

Each sincerely thought that the world contained a limited number of species, and each spent much of their lives trying to catalog these. The French Revolution did in poor Monsieur de Buffon, leaving us with a cumbersome archaic system that is getting further and further out of date as more and more species are discovered. The story of the rivalry of these two men is a fascinating look at the birth of biology and botany.

Every Living Thing by Jason Roberts is a book that compares and contrasts Carl Linnaeus' and Georges-Louis de Buffon's approach to discovering all life on Earth. The book also covers how the study of biology progressed after their deaths, overall showing their great effect on the science.
I think this book is phenomenal. It is written is a very easy to understand way, with some helpful pictures. I particularly like how Roberts arranged the book, it was easy to keep up with the two separate people, and what they were doing at the time. Also, a great emphasis was placed on noting what ideas still exist to this day, incorporating their influences on modern biology throughout the book instead of just as a conclusion. Unusually, a significant portion of the end of the book continued to document important discoveries, such as Darwin's evolution and Mendel's genes. It was interesting to fully know how biology has progressed since their time, and how it continues to progress. Several other subjects were discussed, such as how racism and Christianity were affected these findings. Overall, Every Living Thing covered an impressive amount, in an understandable and fascinating way.
I would recommend this book to anyone looking to learn about the history of the study of biology, or who want an introduction to it.

Every Living Thing has everything I like going for it: It’s a well-written and fascinating history of those rarely-examined events that led to the society in which we find ourselves today. As it happened, both Carl Linnaeus in Sweden and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in France determined to name and categorise every living thing on Earth (after all, how many could there be if they could fit, in pairs, on the Biblical Ark?) in the mid-18th century, and each of them would go on to spend their entire lives in the effort. Author Jason Roberts weaves a compelling biography for each of these proto-biologists — they couldn’t have come from more different backgrounds, and Roberts has a clear favourite between them — and as their legacies unspool into the modern day, it’s discouraging (if not surprising) to learn why the lesser, more cumbersome/inaccurate system for categorisation became our standard. This is exactly to my tastes — from the narrative style to the small details and the overarching whole — and I could not have asked for more.