Charles Darwin: Voyaging
Volume 1 of a biography
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
Few lives of great men offer so much interest - and so many mysteries - as the life of Charles Darwin, the greatest figure of nineteenth-century science, whose ideas are still inspiring discoveries and controversies more than 100 years after his death. Yet, only with the publication of Voyaging, the first volume of this acclaimed biography, do we have a truly vivid and comprehensive picture of Darwin as a man and a scientist.
The second and final volume of Janet Browne's biography of Darwin - The Power of Place - is also available from Pimlico.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The centerpiece of this vivid portrait of Darwin, the first volume of a two-volume biography, is an account of his five-year expedition on the Beagle (1831-36), which transformed a seasick, Cambridge-educated science apprentice into a keen observer of nature and amateur geologist. Drawing on a wealth of new material from family archives, Brown masterfully recreates the personal, cultural and intellectual matrix out of which Darwin's evolutionary theory took shape. We glimpse many facets of Darwin: the failed medical student; the laid-back undergraduate; the impassioned abolitionist; the explorer roping cattle with gauchos on the Argentine pampas; the chronically ill country squire, the patriarchal husband and reluctant atheist whose devout Anglican wife, Emma, disapproved of his theory of human origins. Browne, an English historian of science and associate editor of Darwin's Correspondence, captures the spirit of a quietly revolutionary scientist whose ingrained Victorian prejudices were at odds with his radical ideas. Photos.
