Charles Darwin
Victorian Mythmaker
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Charles Darwin
Narrated by:
Richard Burnip
Buy Now for $33.99
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Narrated by:
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Richard Burnip
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By:
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A N Wilson
About this listen
In this bold new life - the first single volume biography in twenty-five years - A. N. Wilson, the acclaimed author of The Victorians and God's Funeral, goes in search of the celebrated but contradictory figure Charles Darwin.
Darwin was described by his friend and champion, Thomas Huxley, as a 'symbol'. But what did he symbolize? In Wilson's portrait, both sympathetic and critical, Darwin was two men. On the one hand, he was a naturalist of genius, a patient and precise collector and curator who greatly expanded the possibilities of taxonomy and geology. On the other hand, Darwin, a seemingly diffident man who appeared gentle and even lazy, hid a burning ambition to be a universal genius. He longed to have a theory which explained everything.
But was Darwin's 1859 master work, On the Origin of Species, really what it seemed, a work about natural history? Or was it in fact a consolation myth for the Victorian middle classes, reassuring them that the selfishness and indifference to the poor were part of Nature's grand plan?
Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker is a radical reappraisal of one of the great Victorians, a book which isn't afraid to challenge the Darwinian orthodoxy while bringing us closer to the man, his revolutionary idea and the wider Victorian age.
(P)2017 John Murray Press Limited©2017 A N Wilson
Critic Reviews
A book to treasure. A. N Wilson throws down the gauntlet on the very first line, 'Darwin was wrong' he begins. What follows is a sharply observed and wonderfully compelling analysis which evokes the Victorian titan brilliantly and challenges received wisdom. A work of scholarship that is hard to put down
A lucid, elegantly written and thought-provoking social and intellectual history (Adrian Woolfson)
Hugely enjoyable . . . The picture of Darwin that emerges from this biography is a mixed one . . . Wilson unpicks these contradictions with a scientist's forensic skill and a novelist's imaginative touch (Robert Douglas Fairhurst)
As a historian trying to put Darwin in the context of his time, there is surely no better biographer than Wilson (Daisy Goodwin)
Entertaining
As bold, audacious and entertaining as I knew it would be
what surprised me most was how relatively uncontroversial the book was in its conclusions.
An extremely detailed semi biographical work on one of the most famous figures in the history of science. The book makes arguments for which few in the evolutionary biology community would disagree... that Darwin was not the 'discoverer' of the theory of evolution, that a lot of what Darwin said has been proven wrong in hindsight (like almost all good science), and perhaps most controversially that natural selection and evolution seem at a loss to explain certain phenomena.
The audiobook is eminently engaging, and paints a vivid picture of Victorian society and the world of Charles Darwin. A very worthwhile read for any fan of historical biographies, or students of science.
Comprehensive and readable.
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Need several science degrees even to follow this
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Snide, dismissive and anti science
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