Stone Breaker: The Poet James Gates Percival and the Beginning of Geology in New England

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,...