Crowded with Genius

In seventeenth century Scotland, Edinburgh was a filthy backwater synonymous with poverty, disease, and religious fanaticism. A century later, it was an intellectual hotbed, producing groundbreaking books like Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson. Other luminaries like David Hume, Robert Burns, the chemist James Black, and the geologist James Hutton added to Edinburgh’s reputation as a center of creativity and innovation. In his remarkable work Crowded with Genius, James Buchan reconstructs the intimate geographic scale and boundless intellectual world of Enlightenment Edinburgh. The history of the town’s transformation and most glorious era is recounted here with Buchan’s trademark intellectual elegance and his novelist’s flair for vividly bringing a place to life. James Buchan is an acclaimed novelist and critic. He is the author of The Persian Bride, a New York Times Notable Book, as well as Frozen Desire, an examination of money that received the Duff Cooper Prize in 1998. He has also won the Whitbread Prize and the Guardian Fiction Award. He is a contributor to The New York Times Book Review and The New York Observer, and a former foreign correspondent for The Financial Times. He lives in Norfolk, England. “A vivacious and erudite celebration of the flowering of Scottish intellectual life in the eighteenth century.” — The New Yorker