This was excellent and, to my mind, would make a great companion to Andrea Wulf's superb biography, [b:The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World|23995249|The Invention of Nature Alexander von Humboldt's New World|Andrea Wulf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1452449264s/23995249.jpg|43595986]. I truly want to own this.

The artwork is beautifully done and I liked the inclusion of pages of notes and drawings from Humboldt's own notebooks layered into the background of the illustrations. ( )

The irony of the first line, "Let me introduce myself. My name is Alexander von Humboldt, and I'm the most famous scientist and explorer in the world." is that I have never heard of Alexander von Humboldt and had to check that this wasn't fiction.

Having verified he was real, I found myself at times getting drawn into this recounting of his five-year mission to explore a portion of the Spanish Empire in northern South America and Mexico from 1799-1804. He was quite the character with his obsessiveness, giant ego, and tendency to exaggerate.

Unfortunately, the writing and the art kept distracting and detracting. The dialogue was often inane. Giant blocks of text pop up constantly. Word balloons and text are at times poorly placed, stopping the flow of the tale as you decipher the proper reading order. The art is mostly collage with images of document pages in foreign languages scattered behind everything on many pages drawing more attention than they should as I wished I could be reading them instead. And the amateurish awkwardness of Melcher's art stands out in stark contrast to the oil paintings and sampled images used as backgrounds and accents.

It's a borderline 2-star book for me, but I'll go with 3 simply because I feel I learned so much. ( )