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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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