Review by New York Times Review
CHARLES Darwin, a 22-year-old dropout from medical school who subsequently considered becoming a priest, boarded the Beagle in late 1831 and spent five years on the ship, traveling the world and collecting natural specimens. Despite its cuddly name, the Beagle was a naval brig outfitted with 10 guns. Darwin was a "gentleman dining companion" whose official responsibility was to provide civilized banter with the captain. Darwin visited Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti and Tasmania, along with other exotic locales, but he never set foot in the United States. Around 1850, charmed by popular tales of lush countryside and the exciting adventures of the Underground Railroad, and still withholding from public view his explosive theory of evolution, he flirted briefly with the idea of moving his large family, with seven children under the age of 11 and another on the way, to Ohio. The middle states, he wrote, are "what I fancy most." Two arresting new books, timed to coincide with Darwin's 200th birthday, make the case that his epochal achievement in Victorian England can best be understood in relation to events - involving neither tortoises nor finches - on the other side of the Atlantic. Both books confront the touchy subject of Darwin and race head on; both conclude that Darwin, despite the pernicious spread of "social Darwinism" (the notion, popularized by Herbert Spencer, that human society progresses through the "survival of the fittest"), was no racist. Adrian Desmond and James Moore published a highly regarded biography of Darwin in 1991. The argument of their new book, "Darwin's Sacred Cause," is bluntly stated in its subtitle: "How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution." They set out to overturn the widespread view that Darwin was a "tough-minded scientist" who unflinchingly followed the trail of empirical research until it led to the stunning and unavoidable theory of evolution. This narrative, they claim, is precisely backward. "Darwin's starting point," they write, "was the abolitionist belief in blood kinship, a 'common descent'" of all human beings. "The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather," Darwin wrote, but his human grandfathers are more central to the circumstantial case that Desmond and Moore assemble. The poet-physician Erasmus Darwin and the industrial potter Josiah Wedgwood were close friends among a circle of mechanical-minded Dissenters from the Anglican Church. Darwin and Wedgwood shared a hatred of the slave trade, contributing money and propaganda - in the form of anti-slavery verse and ceramic curios - to the "sacred cause" of abolition. Wedgwood's cameo medallion of a chained slave, with the caption "Am I not a Man and a Brother?," was "a must-have solidarity accessory." Darwins and Wedgwoods mated for several generations, like an experiment in interbreeding, and the "sacred cause" was an inherited characteristic. Darwin's mother, who died in 1817, was a Wedgwood; he himself married Emma Wedgwood, his first cousin. Concern for all things lowly was almost an article of faith for the Wedgwood cousins, who taught young Darwin to euthanize earthworms in brine before impaling them on a fishhook. Such compassion seems not to have been extended to the fish, nor to the 55 partridges that Darwin bagged in a single week of shooting. During his medical studies at Edinburgh University, he learned to stuff birds from a former slave whom he described as "a very pleasant and intelligent man." For Desmond and Moore, the voyage of the Beagle was less important for the accumulation of finches and barnacles than for giving Darwin an eyewitness experience of slavery, which "put shredded flesh on the Wedgwood cameo." Particularly poignant was a scream overheard when he was canoeing through the "putrid exhalations" of mangrove swamps in the Brazilian interior. "To this day," Darwin later wrote in his journal, "if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate." Darwin's power, according to Desmond and Moore, lay in his marshaling an argument for the unitary origin and hence "brotherhood" of all human beings, and this, they argue, is precisely what Darwin achieved in "The Origin of Species" and later in "The Descent of Man." The case they make is rich and intricate, involving Darwin's encounter with race-based phrenology at Edinburgh and a religiously based opposition to slavery at Cambridge. Even Darwin's courtship of Emma, whom he winningly called the "most interesting specimen in the whole series of vertebrate animals," is cleverly interwoven with his developing thoughts on "sexual selection," the aesthetic preference for certain traits, like skin color in humans or plumage in peacocks, that over time leads to those superficial variations we mistakenly think of as "racial." But what if Darwin's evidence had led to conclusions that did not support his belief in the unitary origins of mankind? Would he have fudged the data? Desmond and Moore don't really address the question. One is left with the impression that Darwin was amazingly lucky that his benevolent preconceptions turned out to fit the facts. In his lively and wide-ranging "Angels and Ages," Adam Gopnik suggests that when facts and values clash we might live in accordance with our beliefs anyway. "It might be true - there is absolutely no such evidence, but it might be true - that different ethnic groups, or sexes, have on average different innate aptitudes for math or science," he muses. "We might decide to even things out, give some people extra help toward that end, or we might decide just to live with the disparity." Gopnik's short book takes its impetus from a striking historical coincidence: "On Feb. 12, 1809, two baby boys were born within a few hours of each other on either side of the Atlantic." Those babies, one rich and one poor, as in a plot of Mark Twain's, were Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. Though he makes some dubious claims about parallels - "lives lived in one time have similar shapes" - Gopnik's real comparison is between two writers. "They matter most," he claims, "because they wrote so well." More specifically, Darwin and Lincoln, drawing on their seemingly unpoetic backgrounds in legal argument and natural history, invented "a new kind of eloquence" that we still use for "the way we live now and the way we talk at home and in public." Both of Gopnik's interwoven essays, originally published in different form as articles in The New Yorker, where he is a staff writer, involve mysteries to be solved. The first mystery is whether the secretary of war Edwin Stanton said by Lincoln's deathbed, "Now he belongs to the ages" or "Now he belongs to the angels" - whether, in other words, he invoked the consolations of historical memory or religion. Witnesses reported both. For Darwin, the mystery is why he delayed the publication of his theory of natural selection, with all essentials in place in 1838, for 20 years. Gopnik dutifully offers solutions to both mysteries, but his real interests lie elsewhere. Gopnik is as convinced as Desmond and Moore that Darwin was no kind of racist. "The one thing that you could not read into Darwin's writings was racism," he writes. And yet, in another sense the books seem directly opposed. What Gopnik finds in Darwin's early career is not some overarching moral principle but rather "pure plain looking." What set Darwin apart was that "he liked to look at things the way an artist likes to draw, the way a composer likes to play the piano, the way a cook likes to chop onions." Desmond and Moore think the key to Darwin was the lowly slave; Gopnik thinks the key to Darwin was the lowly earthworm, the subject of his last book. Darwin's emphasis on "the homely, the overlooked, the undervalued" made him, in Gopnik's view, both a great scientist and a great writer. If Darwin's eloquence rests on "the slow crawl of fact . . . building toward a big blade of point," Gopnik finds a related eloquence in Lincoln's preference for legal minutiae - "the close crawl across the facts of a case" - over grandiose oratory. In this regard, Lincoln and Darwin were "nearsighted visionaries." Some of Gopnik's best pages are extended analyses of passages in which Lincoln, in his great speeches, pursues "the drill of monosyllabic summation - the urge, natural to a lawyer, to say something hard one last time in short, flat words," or in which Darwin finds evidence that the sexual passion of earthworms "is strong enough to overcome for a time their dread of light." For Gopnik, who has published popular books about the joys of parenting in Paris and New York, Lincoln and Darwin were down-to-earth because they were devoted "family men." His attempt to find coziness in their family life sometimes verges on the sentimental, as he himself acknowledges. "We want the Darwins (like the Lincolns) to be loving and indulgent and attentive parents because then they will be like us." Gopnik may be right that the early deaths of their children, Annie Darwin at age 10 and Willie Lincoln at 11, introduced a fatalistic note of tragedy - beyond what Lincoln called the "awful arithmetic" of the Civil War or Darwin called the relentless "struggle for life" - into their prose styles. But it is his astute analysis of those styles that shows us why these thinkers and writers, who maintained "a tragic consciousness without robbing it of a hopeful view," have so robustly survived to our own time. The celebrated voyage of the Beagle gave Darwin an eyewitness view of the horrors of slavery. Christopher Benfey, the Mellon professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, is the author, most recently, of "A Summer of Hummingbirds" and "American Audacity."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Building on the coincidence that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day February 12, 1809 Gopnik submits a dual biography, which basically contains his musings on the intellectual impact of these protean figures. The perceptive, very articulate author (a New Yorker writer) sees Lincoln and Darwin within a specific focus, namely, the particular issues in each man's life that, once overcome, propelled him into greatness. The real ascent of Lincoln is not from log cabin to White House; it is from backwoods to bar, posits Gopnik; and to him, the problem Darwin faced was also a rhetorical one: how to say something that had never been said before in a way that made it sound like something everybody had always known. The vehicle by which the two men were able to so successfully purvey their ideas was their special articulateness: Lincoln in his speeches, Darwin in his books since, according to Gopnik, literary eloquence is essential to liberal civilization. A not-easily-digested but certainly intriguing treatise, appealing to a popular audience as the nation and world celebrate the bicentennial of this duo's birth.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In the year of Darwin's and Lincoln's bicentennial, New Yorker contributor Gopnik (Through the Children's Gate) can't resist the temptation to find parallels of cultural impact between the men, born on the same day in 1809, seeing them as twin exemplars of modernity. Gopnik notes that "it is not what they have in common with each other that matters; it is what they have in common with us." And that commonality lies in the modern way of speaking (plainly) and thinking (scientific and liberal in the broad sense). But the comparison of the two men feels like a stretch, and Gopnik's notion that the very idea of democracy was precarious until Lincoln freed the slaves isn't wholly convincing. In potted biographies of the two, Gopnik emphasizes the influence of Lincoln the lawyer on Lincoln the politician, and Darwin's unusual abilities as a writer of science. Most successfully, Gopnik underscores the importance of eloquence in spreading new ideas, and his notion that Lincoln and Darwin exemplify the modern predicament-that humans must live in the "space between what we know and what we feel"-is resonant and worth thinking about. (Jan. 30) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This book is about the greatness of two very different men who happened to be born on the same day, February 12, 1809, on different sides of the Atlantic. Gopnik argues that Lincoln's training in the law and Darwin's as a naturalist shaped their writing styles and propelled their thinking on the central issues facing them. Unfortunately for Gopnik, this work just can't compete with such recent Lincoln studies as William Lee Miller's President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman and Janet Browne's on Darwin. Gopnik's flashy little book is larded with judgments that seem insightful at first but don't unpack well. What does it mean to say that Lincoln and Darwin are "emblematic of figures in the spread of bourgeois liberal democracy, and the central role for science that goes with it"? How is science central to Lincoln's thought in any meaningful way? And how does Darwin's thought symbolize "bourgeois liberal democracy"? This facile observation ties the two figures together but doesn't illuminate them. The book's title refers to Secretary of State Stanton's observation at Lincoln's deathbed, remembered either as "Now he belongs to the angels" or "the ages," but the question as to wording does not provide an adequate organizing framework here. Gopnik refers frequently to other scholars and provides a bibliography but no footnotes or index. Not recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/08.]-David Keymer, Modesto, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The coincidence of a birthday shared by two titans of modern history yields an absorbing joint appreciation of the politics of emancipation, evolutionary science and their respective contributions to the world we know now. Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same winter day in 1809. New Yorker contributor Gopnik (Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York, 2006, etc.) seizes that day to muse on the meaning of their lives and ours. Reworked from a pair of previously published essays, his pensive exegesis describes how humankind's worldview was permanently altered by an iconic American's upward mobility and a well-born Briton's discerning and skeptical eye. By 1838, Darwin had come to his understanding of natural selection, and Lincoln had delivered his crucial Lyceum lecture. The sensitive observer and the astute lawyer each suffered the loss of a beloved child, a blow no less devastating for being a common one in the 19th century. Both were masters of rhetoricspoken persuasion in Lincoln's case, written inducement in Darwin'sand their words changed our beliefs. They made us beholden to the future, declares Gopnik, as we once were only to the past. The rigors of democracy and science became part of civilization's habit. Logic and fact, including the fact of death, did matter after all. The author aspires to philosophical flights as he considers the question of what precisely Edwin Stanton said at the Emancipator's deathbed. Did he aver that Lincoln "belongs to the ages," or "to the angels"? Perhaps both apply, writes Gopnik, since this world embraces both the mundane and the evanescent. Despite indulging in such bombastic statements as, "all their angels are ages, and the ages held out a distant halo of angels," this talented, skillful critic achieves considerable new, heartfelt depth. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
