While much of this material has been covered in recent full-length biographies, Quammen’s portrait of the great man and his...
A first-rate look at the English naturalist’s career after the Beagle; part of the Atlas Books Great Discoveries Series.
Quammen (Monster of God, 2003, etc.) focuses on how Darwin arrived at his theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1836, arriving home from his voyage, he essentially had all the key facts of evolution; but it was more than 20 years before he published The Origin of Species. One factor was a mysterious stomach ailment, possibly tropical disease, possibly nerves, that dogged him for most of his remaining life. A second was the business of finding a wife and starting a family, a process that ended with him happily married to cousin Emma Wedgwood. That was a fortuitous match, despite her strong religious beliefs (Darwin was already well down the road to agnosticism); their fathers pitched in enough to support the newlyweds, with enough left over to reinvest. But a fair amount of time went to scientific work, especially Darwin’s eight-year project of classifying barnacles, which gave him, in his own mind, a solid credential to back up the theory he knew was bound to be controversial. But even with that work out of the way, he dragged his feet. He was finally roused by the arrival on his doorstep of a manuscript by Alfred Russel Wallace, in which the central elements of his theory were unambiguously spelled out. At that point, it was publish or give up his priority. Quammen gives a broad-brush account of the book’s composition and its reception; of the developments in evolutionary theory since Darwin’s initial formulation; and of the scientist’s final years.
While much of this material has been covered in recent full-length biographies, Quammen’s portrait of the great man and his magnum opus is affectionate and well-paced.Pub Date: July 31, 2006
ISBN: 0-393-05981-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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
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
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