The Origin

Fülszöveg

The Origin fills an important gap in the
literature on Charles Darwin. A. L. Rowse,
the distinguished Oxford historian, calls it
"an extraordinary achievement on Irving
Stone's part The whole world knows
Darwin's name, but hardly anything about
the man, the human being. Now at last we
shall be able to see him and his work in the
round, in proper perspective."
At the age of twenty-two, Charles Darwin
was a charming, lighthearted young man
without very positive ideas on his career or
future. A recent graduate of Cambridge, he
was about to enter the Church when, out of
the blue, a letter arrived inviting him to sail
with H.M.S. Beagle as a naturalist. The
surveying voyage would encircle the globe.
When Darwin left Plymouth in 1832,
bound for Brazil, Tierra del Fuego, the
Galápagos Islands, the South Seas and
beyond, he was an "unfinished" naturalist,
an amateur geologist, energetic and curious,
an insatiable collector filled with wonder, but
hardly a... Tovább

Fülszöveg

The Origin fills an important gap in the
literature on Charles Darwin. A. L. Rowse,
the distinguished Oxford historian, calls it
"an extraordinary achievement on Irving
Stone's part The whole world knows
Darwin's name, but hardly anything about
the man, the human being. Now at last we
shall be able to see him and his work in the
round, in proper perspective."
At the age of twenty-two, Charles Darwin
was a charming, lighthearted young man
without very positive ideas on his career or
future. A recent graduate of Cambridge, he
was about to enter the Church when, out of
the blue, a letter arrived inviting him to sail
with H.M.S. Beagle as a naturalist. The
surveying voyage would encircle the globe.
When Darwin left Plymouth in 1832,
bound for Brazil, Tierra del Fuego, the
Galápagos Islands, the South Seas and
beyond, he was an "unfinished" naturalist,
an amateur geologist, energetic and curious,
an insatiable collector filled with wonder, but
hardly a professional scientist. By the time he
returned five years later, he was an experi-
enced naturalist with a growing reputation in
England, a priceless collection of rare and
unknown plants and creatures, and a set of
notebooks containing the germ of an idea
about the origin of species - one that was to
shake the foundations of accepted wisdom
everywhere.
No author is better qualified to recount this
tremendous tale than Irving Stone, whose
subjects have included Michelangelo, Van
Gogh, and Freud. The Origin is not only the
tale of the Beagle's cruise but the account of
(continued on back flap) Vissza