Word: darwins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Rather than a biographical re-hash - wise, for possibly only Jesus bests Lincoln in the number of published books devoted to a single person - Gopnik offers a meditation on each man's most literary qualities: Lincoln's deceptively simple legalistic language and Darwin's crystalline powers of observation. And what could have been a gimmick (a book timed to twin bicentennials is as close as historical biographies get to a home run) becomes something more, a learned treatise that worships learning. Gone is the overly twee writing of Gopnik's memoir-inflected works (Paris to the Moon, Through the Children...
Much has been made in recent weeks of the shared birthday of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, two juggernauts not only of their own age, but of all the years since. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik explores their legacies in this book-length series of essays, focusing on their abilities as writers and thinkers of the highest caliber. As Gopnik writes, "Literary eloquence is essential to liberal civilization; our heroes should be men and women possessed by the urgency of utterance." With their adherence to logic and observation, and devotion to thoughtful expression, Lincoln and Darwin - in addition to everything...
...larger effects of Darwin's writing: "[T]he most important way in which Darwin altered his era was by getting people who did do science to ask a new kind of question. Some scientific revolutions have surprisingly small ideological aftershocks; Michael Faraday's discovery that electricity and magnetism are the same thing was as large a discovery as any in the history of science, but it had a paltry aftereffect...For a new scientific theory to become a model in its time, vastly influential outside its immediate claims, it has to release thinking people from a bond that they...
...worth reading because they advance our liberal education. Just as we don't read Dante for a sneak peek at the afterlife or because we expect someday to be confronted with a diabolical architecture of circles within circles and punishments suited to our sins, we don't read Darwin because what he says is what scientists now believe - much of it isn't. We read him because a book of eloquent argument and well-ordered evidence...reminds us of the powers of the human mind to bring light to darkness, make a clearing in the wood of confusion...
What do Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, G.I. Joe and Charles Darwin have in common? They will all be coming to movie theaters this year. The only real person on that list will be played by Paul Bettany in the biopic Creation. And in true celebrity fashion, Darwin will be everywhere this year. In a convergence of anniversaries, Darwin would have turned 200 years old on Feb. 12, and his landmark book, On the Origin of Species, turns 150 on Nov. 24. There will be documentaries, lectures, conferences and museum exhibits. Darwin-themed blogs are being launched, and a cartload...