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From the Marginalian creator and bestselling author Maria Popova, a bold exploration of what makes a meaningful life.

In Traversal, her startling and moving new book, Maria Popova traverses the border between life and death, chance and choice, chemistry and consciousness: What makes a body a person? What makes a planet a world? How do we safeguard our love of truth from our lust for power? What slakes our longings and what redeems our losses?

Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with these questions—our telescopes and our treatises, our postulates and our poems—through the intertwined lives, loves, and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright, Doroth

Maria Popova

Books by Maria Popova

Traversal