A World On Fire:a Heretic, An Aristocrat, And The Race To Discover Oxygen

Description

Like Charles Seife’s Zero and Dava Sobel’s Longitude, this passionate intellectual history is the story of the intersection of science and the human, in this case the rivals who discovered oxygen in the late 1700s. That breakthrough changed the world as radically as those of Newton and Darwin but was at first eclipsed by revolution and reaction. In chronicling the triumph and ruin of the English freethinker Joseph Priestley and the French nobleman Antoine Lavoisier—the former exiled, the latter executed on the guillotine—A World on Fire illustrates the perilous place of science in an age of unreason.

About the Author

Joe Jackson is the author of seven works of nonfiction and a novel. His nonfiction includes:Leavenworth Train, a finalist for the 2002 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime;Dead Run: The Shocking Story of Dennis Stockton and Life on Death Row in America, with co-author William F. Burke and an introduction by William Styron;A Furnace Afloat: The Wreck of the Hornet and the Harrowing 4,300-mile of its Survivors;A World on Fire: A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen;The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire, one of Time magazine's Top Ten Books of 2008; andAtlantic Fever: Lindbergh, His Competitors, and the Race to Cross the Atlantic, released by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in May 2012. A first novel,How I Left the Great State of Tennessee and Went on to Better Things, was released in March 2004.His seventh work of nonfiction -Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary- was released by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in October 2016; it chronicles the life of Oglala Lakota holy man Black Elk, best known for his 1932 Black Elk Speaks, written in collaboration with the Nebraska poet-laureate John Neihardt. Jackson's biography received the following honors and awards in 2017: Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; Best Biography of 2016, True West magazine; Winner of the Western Writers of America 2017 Spur Award, Best Western Biography; Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography; and One of the Best Books of 2016, The Boston Globe.