The Man Who Knew Everything: The Strange Life of Athanasius Kircher

Gr 4–7—What do volcanoes, cat pianos, and censorship have in common? Seventeenth-century scientist, Athanasius Kircher. Although not widely known today, Kircher's life provides an entertaining prehistory to modern science. Peters reveals that Kircher was not so much "the Man Who Knew Everything" but an insatiably curious person in a changing world. The religious violence of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) provides a backdrop to Kircher's rise from German peasant boy to travelling Jesuit priest; Catholicism enabled and threatened Kircher's research. The biography is interspersed with witty cartouches, time lines, and sections describing experiments and the validity of Kircher's theories. Kircher's methodology was balanced between the Renaissance man's omnivorous inquiry and the modern scientist's narrow specialization: he might have warded off the plague by wearing a dead toad, but he also gained geological observations by lowering himself into the smoking mouth of Mount Vesuvius in a basket. Short blocks of text are balanced by Bikadoroff's illustrations, which blend engravings from Kircher's texts with colorful line drawings. A brief afterword notes Kircher's recent rise in popularity, tacitly asking what learners and educators can gain by moving beyond STEM-dominated lessons.