A welcome addition to Darwin studies.
A geologist dives headfirst into an exploration of Charles Darwin and his work, demonstrating how he shares Darwin’s “passion for understanding the earth and Homo Sapiens’ place upon it.”
Everyone knows that Darwin’s observations during the voyage of the Beagle revolutionized our view of nature, but few know that the study of geology occupied much of those years. In this eye-opening account of a less well-known side of Darwin, Wesson, who worked at the U.S. Geological Survey for four decades and is now the scientist emeritus there, follows the oddball tradition that biographers retrace the footsteps of their subjects, no matter how tedious. The author chronicles his slogs through Brazilian forests, Argentine pampas, and Chilean and Scottish mountains, travels that, if nothing else, reveal the young Darwin’s inexhaustible energy. “Whatever rock, fossil, landscape, rodent, bird, or beetle that he found, he wanted to tell its story,” writes Wesson. Marine fossils had been turning up on mountaintops for a century. This didn’t bother traditional geologists, but younger scientists, led by Charles Lyell (1797-1875), claimed that gradual, observable processes could explain these phenomena. Early in the voyage, Darwin’s keen eye detected beaches hundreds of feet above shorelines. Examining coral reefs and atolls, he concluded that they could only form with uplift and subsidence of the islands they surrounded. Most dramatically, earthquakes shaped the landscape. Following a catastrophic Chilean quake, he measured, documented, and gathered eyewitness testimony as evidence that the land had risen. After the Beagle docked, Darwin’s lectures and publications thrilled advocates of this new view of geological processes. By 1840, when he turned his attention to natural history, he was a major British scientific figure. Wesson’s travels are mildly interesting, but he hits the jackpot when he concentrates on his subject and reveals that 20 years before Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, his genius was already in evidence.
A welcome addition to Darwin studies.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-316-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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