A richly detailed, vivid, and definitive portrait with not a word wasted: the best life of Charles Darwin in the modern...
Continuing where Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995) left off, the British science historian completes her brilliant two-volume biography.
The narrative opens in 1858, when Darwin received a letter posted by Alfred Russel Wallace from a faraway Indonesian island. Though it reinforced Darwin’s long-held (but unpublished) evolutionary views, the letter destroyed any hope that he was the sole originator of those ideas. The shock prompted the writing and reluctant publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, but Darwin shouldn’t have been surprised, writes Browne (History of Biology/Wellcome Inst., London). Anticipations of natural selection and speciation abounded in contemporary scientific literature; he had simply “closed his mind to the possibility that other thinkers might be moving along the same road as he and that any one of them might come up with the same answer.” To his credit, Darwin accommodated the views of Wallace and others, which had the effect of unifying disparate parties in what amounted to a scientific revolution. At a time of unfettered empire, aggressively expanding markets, and “carboniferous capitalism,” Darwin’s exploration of the struggle for survival and the necessity of adaptation seemed very apt, even though it overturned Victorians’ notions that nature “mirrored the social stability they thought they saw around them.” On the contrary, Darwin quietly insisted, the world had no moral purpose or validity. He himself was not inclined to rely on fate, Brown demonstrates: for all his apparent desire to be left alone to lead the life of a country gentleman, Darwin was a shrewd self-promoter, vigorously publicizing his work even in the depths of a long illness that she suggests may have been brought on in part by his tireless labors. An overlooked magazine questionnaire from 1874 reveals that he considered himself something of a failure except as a businessman.
A richly detailed, vivid, and definitive portrait with not a word wasted: the best life of Charles Darwin in the modern literature.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2002
ISBN: 0-679-42932-8
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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
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