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Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life By Adam Gopnik 211 pages; Knopf...
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...
...everyone should read On the Origin of Species: "Great books of science, like all great books, are worth reading not just for what they add to objective knowledge; they are 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...
...Within. Military strategies--even successful ones--are, like laws and sausages, not something civilians necessarily want to see made. Still, Ricks' reporting and insight from the front lines of Iraq support his conclusion that the U.S. is likely to be fighting there until at least 2015. His first book on the war, 2006's Fiasco, was a bleak tale of martial malfeasance. His second suggests there may be light at the end of the tunnel, but if there is, it's flickering--and a long...