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Stone Breaker
The Poet James Gates Percival and the Beginning of Geology in New England
Series: The Driftless Connecticut Series & Garnet Books
Sales Date: 2023-04-04
Percival probed the volcanic origins of rock via geology and the seething nature of his psyche via poetry
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. The book includes historic photographs and paintings of the Connecticut landscape.
Publication of this book is funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.
Acknowledgements • Introduction • A Tranquil and Tumultuous Childhood • Benjamin Silliman Brings Science to Yale • Physician, Heal Thyself • Poetry as a Way of Being • The Shift to Geology • The Connecticut Geological Survey • An Intermezzo of Music and Language • West to the Frontier of Wisconsin • Epilogue • Appendix I, Selected Poetry • Appendix II, The Art of Nelson Augustus Moore
KATHLEEN L. HOUSLEY (Glastonbury, CT) is the author of nine books including Black Sand: The History of Titanium and The Scientific World of Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer: the Entanglement of Science, Religion, and Politics in Nazi Germany.
"Stone Breaker is a fascinating and beautifully written biography. Using the unusual mind of James Gates Percival as an exemplar, Kathleen Housley deftly weaves together the science, art, and literature of early 19th century New England. A wonderful read."
~Robert M. Thorson, author of Stone by Stone and professor of Geosciences, University of Connecticut
"A wonderful, carefully researched biography of this deeply impressive, multidisciplinary intellectual."
~John Hay, associate professor, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
"Stone Breaker is a lively and engaging biography of a fascinating man. This is a captivating portrait of a brilliant and relentless geologist and polymath whose work helped lay the foundation for generations of Earth scientists working in New England."
~Maureen D. Long, Bruce D. Alexander '65 Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Yale University
"Housley's insightful and readable biography illuminates the potent combination of poetry and science that defined Percival's undeservedly neglected life and works, offering a new perspective on this critical moment when the true scale of the earth's history was coming into focus."
~Clare Stainthorp, author of Constance Naden: Scientist, Philosopher, Poet
""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 no lab science.""
~Tracey O'Shaughnessy, Republican American
"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, Isis
"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, Connecticut History Review
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