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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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