Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life (英國版)(2025年普立茲傳記獎)

本書講述18世紀兩位自然科學家──林奈與布豐──之間的對比與競爭。他們都嘗試完成一個艱鉅任務：為地球上的所有生物進行分類與描述。林奈相信生命可以被整齊地歸類，而布豐則認為自然是多變而複雜的。他們的觀點分歧，影響了後世對自然、演化與人類角色的理解。作者經過多年研究，以清晰的筆法呈現這段真實歷史，讓讀者了解兩人如何推動生物學的發展，也反思科學與文化如何交織影響至今。

Pulitzer Prize for Biography
Finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year

The dramatic, globe-spanning and meticulously-researched story of two scientific rivals and their race to survey all life.

In the 18th century, two men dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Their approaches could not have been more different. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster’s flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France’s royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic, ever-changing swirl of complexities. Both began believing their work to be difficult, but not impossible–how could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species? Stunned by life’s diversity, both fell far short of their goal. But in the process they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, on humanity’s role in shaping the fate of our planet, and on humanity itself.

The rivalry between these two unique, driven individuals created reverberations that still echo today. Linnaeus, with the help of acolyte explorers he called “apostles” (only half of whom returned alive), gave the world such concepts as mammal, primate and homo sapiens–but he also denied species change and promulgated racist pseudo-science. Buffon coined the term reproduction, formulated early prototypes of evolution and genetics, and argued passionately against prejudice. It was a clash that, during their lifetimes, Buffon seemed to be winning. But their posthumous fates would take a very different turn.

With elegant, propulsive prose grounded in more than a decade of research, bestselling author Jason Roberts tells an unforgettable true-life tale of intertwined lives and enduring legacies, tracing an arc of insight and discovery that extends across three centuries into the present day.