Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
by Jason Roberts
🏆 Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
Every Living Thing by Jason Roberts is a dual biography of the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) and Georges-Louis de Buffon (1707-1788), a French aristocrat and author of a 36-volume Natural History, as they sought to categorize the natural world. Although better known today, Linnaeus does not come out of the book looking good, and it was Buffon’s ideas that led more directly to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection just under a century later.
