An illuminating new biography of a legendary figure in the scientific world whose legacy continues to draw reappraisals.
The prolific novelist and biographer probes the character and controversies of Charles Darwin’s life and the controversial theory that turned the world on its head.
Wilson (The Queen, 2017, etc.) writes that Victorian England, deep into the Industrial Revolution, “was ready for a theory of nature which revealed everything in existence to be in a state of becoming, rather than fixed arrival.” Born into an upper-class family, Darwin followed in the footsteps of his father and attended medical school. However, he was more intrigued by the natural world than human bodies, and when he was given the opportunity to join an exploratory voyage, he took it. The huge collection of natural specimens that Darwin amassed on this five-year voyage was, in Wilson’s eyes, his greatest achievement. After settling down to a quiet country life with his family, Darwin formulated the theory of evolution that he would lay out in On the Origin of Species and further develop in The Descent of Man. Wilson thoroughly analyzes the various facets of Darwin’s life for influences both conscious and unconscious. While Darwin is usually credited with the theory of evolution, another scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace, actually came up with the theory at the same time. Both found inspiration from a tract about human population by Thomas Malthus. While most of us now take evolution as a given, there were plenty of questions left open, some of which Darwin himself recognized. The study of genetics has answered some of these questions, but the idea of evolution as the “survival of the fittest” continues to be challenged. Integrating a wealth of biographical details with in-depth discussions of the criticisms and arguments around Darwinism, Wilson helps readers understand how Darwin was an almost inevitable product of his times. As he writes, “the idea…that he alone was responsible for the scales falling from the eyes of the human race is a piece of mythology.”
An illuminating new biography of a legendary figure in the scientific world whose legacy continues to draw reappraisals.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-243349-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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