This first volume of a definitive new Darwin biography is full of insight into both the man and his era. Browne (History of Science/The Wellcome Institute, England) draws on her background as an associate editor of the eight- volume edition of Darwin's correspondence. In his early years, Darwin showed no great ambition; the youngest son of a country doctor, he was an unmotivated medical student in Edinburgh, and a Cambridge scholar nominally studying for the ministry. The opportunity to sail with HMS Beagle in 1831 came more or less out of the blue; he was invited to act as a gentleman companion to its neurotic young captain, Robert Fitzroy, as much because of his respectable family background as because of his connections in the Cambridge naturalist community. But motivated now by the chance to observe nature directly, Darwin made the most of it. Browne devotes considerable space to his eye-opening experiences in South America, the Gal†pagos Islands, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa—giving a remarkable picture of life at sea as well as of the scientific explorations. Returning to England, Darwin quickly made important scientific friends, who were impressed both by his collections and by his quick mind. But it was only slowly—after a closer study of the finches he had found in the Gal†pagos and after his reading of Malthus's population theories—that his theory of natural selection took shape. At first, especially after his marriage to his conventionally pious cousin Emma Wedgwood, Darwin was afraid to do more than hint at his speculations, and then only to trusted scientific colleagues. But as he became more sure of the meaning of his data, he realized that he was obligated to make his findings public. The book closes in 1856, as Darwin is preparing to write On the Origin of Species. An exciting and richly evocative portrait of one of the most important thinkers in scientific history that leaves the reader wishing the second volume were already on hand. (48 pages photos and 4 maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1995
ISBN: 0-394-57942-9
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
