A probing, well-written overview of Darwin’s impact.
A provocative short biography of one of the most influential scientists of all time.
Historian and prolific biographer Johnson (Socrates: A Man for Our Times, 2011, etc.) begins by noting the importance of heredity in Darwin’s accomplishment. Both his grandfathers and his father, arguably geniuses in their own right, bequeathed to Charles the intellectual tools to pursue science, plus the financial security to do so without the compromises of making a living. In addition to a first-rate education, he received the opportunity to join the HMS Beagle expedition, gathering the material evidence for his theory of evolution. Johnson quickly summarizes the key events of Darwin’s formative days, then devotes the meat of the book to his development of the theory and the publication of The Origin of Species. Darwin’s long delay in publishing his theories may have been based on a fear of religious opposition, but Johnson argues that the opposition was comparatively mild. Unfortunately, writes the author, Darwin’s failure to recognize Gregor Mendel’s work on heredity, published only a few years after Origin, deprived him from recognizing the final element needed to explain how natural selection works. Johnson also points to what he considers two central flaws in Darwin’s work: a too-literal acceptance of Malthus’ theories and insufficient understanding of anthropology. More pernicious, according to Johnson, was Darwin’s insufficient understanding of the non-Western societies he encountered. He too easily swallowed second- and thirdhand accounts that portrayed Maoris and other native peoples as bordering on subhuman. Together, Johnson writes, those elements led to social Darwinism, a philosophy that was used to justify the worst atrocities of the modern era, from British colonial oppression to Hitler to Pol Pot. While it may be an unfair accusation, it’s certainly sobering.
A probing, well-written overview of Darwin’s impact.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02571-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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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