A good place to start for those new to Darwin’s life and work.
A worthy one-volume life of the eminent—and blessedly lucky—naturalist.
Is there anything left to say about the sage of Down House after Janet Browne’s magisterial two-part Charles Darwin (Vol. II, p. 851; Vol. I, 1995) and Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin (1992)? Apart from a few bits of data, perhaps not, as retired English business consultant Aydon gamely acknowledges. But there’s always room for interpretation, and in assessing the facts of Darwin’s life and its legacy, Aydon acquits himself very well indeed, showing a command not only of biographical matter and the considerable literature of Darwiniana but also of the complex science involved. Aydon emphasizes one salient fact at the outset: Darwin’s path to success and influence was made far easier, though by no means inevitable, by the happy accident that he was born wealthy, a fact Darwin realized while still a university student and that meant, as he wrote in his memoirs, “my father would leave me enough property to subsist on with some comfort” without Darwin’s having to do anything disagreeable, such as finding a job. Still, Aydon hastens to add, Darwin was not supercilious about his good fortune, and he worked endlessly at everything that caught his interest while taking time to be a devoted husband and father. Aydon gives a well-rounded, sometimes critical portrait of a man who, through “customary self-absorption,” could be less than generous in acknowledging those who helped him along the way—particularly the unfortunate Robert Fitzroy, the captain of HMS Beagle, whom Aydon presents with considerable sympathy. Indeed, Aydon devotes more attention to Fitzroy than have many biographers, arguing that Fitzroy provided not only the physical means for Darwin to make the five-year voyage of discovery that would open the way to evolutionary theory, but also intellectual stimulus; as he writes, “It is amazing that so little credit has been given to those thousands of hours of shipboard conversation in published accounts of Darwin’s intellectual development.”
A good place to start for those new to Darwin’s life and work.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7867-1047-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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