Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists - Hardcover

Stott, Rebecca

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1408809087 ISBN 13: 9781408809082

Verlag: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012

Über diesen Titel

Críticas:

Extraordinarily wide-ranging and engaging ... Stott's gifts as a novelist mean that each of her subjects emerges as living in ordinary weather and among objects, family and political difficulties ... She draws on an array of scholarship and assembles it into an intricate sequence of stories and investigations that are her own ... Gripping (Gillian Beer, The Sunday Telegraph)

Riveting ... told with style and historical nous ... Stott has done a wonderful job in showing just how many extraordinary people had speculated on where we came from before the great theorist dispelled any doubts (Richard Fortey, Guardian)

A fascinating history of an idea that is crucial to our understand of life on earth (Ziauddin Sardar, Independent)

***** Mesmerising, colourful and often moving ... a richly drawn exploration of the key figures on Darwin's list ... this many threaded story of intellectual development is hypnotic. The subject is science, but Stott has a novelist's confidence ... this is a sympathetic examination of the innate human qualities of curiosity and inquiry (Daily Telegraph)

Thrilling ... impressively researched ... A gripping and ambitious history of science which gives a vivid sense of just how many forebears Darwin had; even if none of them can match the man himself (Sunday Times)

Rebecca Stott's beautifully written and compelling book is the story of some of the men - and they were all men - who came before, and how the evolution of their ideas mirrors the evolution of species ... These mavericks and heretics put their lives on the line. Finally, they are getting the credit they deserve (Independent on Sunday)

Clever, compassionate and compellingly written, Stott has interwoven history and science to enchanting effect. The evolution of the theory of evolution is a brilliant idea for a book, and she has realised it wonderfully (Tom Holland)

Stott's research is broad and unerring; her book is wonderful ... An exhilerating romp through 2,000 years of fascinating scientific history (Nature)

From Aristotle onwards, evolutionists have - thank God - always been a quarrelsome lot; and not much has changed. Rebecca Stott shows how dispute, prejudice and rage have accompanied their science from the very beginning. Darwin's Ghosts is a gripping history of the history of life and of those who have studied it, with plenty of lessons for today - perhaps for today's biologists most of all (Steve Jones)

A masterful retelling of the collective daring of a few like-minded men who had the courage to publish their speculations at a time when to do so, for political as well as religious reasons, was to risk everything. It is the story of an idea that would change the modern world (Observer)

Reseña del editor:

Christmas, 1859. Just one month after the publication of On the Origin of Species, Darwin received a letter that deeply unsettled him. He had expected criticism. Letters were arriving every day like swarms, some expressing praise, most outrage and accusations of heresy. But the letter from the Reverend Powell was different. It accused Darwin of failing to acknowledge his predecessors, of having taken credit for a theory that had already been discovered by others, Baden Powell himself and Darwin's own grandfather among them.

For all the excuses that leapt to mind - publication had been rushed; he hadn't been well - Darwin knew he had made a grave error in omitting to mention his intellectual forebears. Yet when he tried to trace these natural philosophers, he found that history had already forgotten them...

In Darwin's Ghosts, historian and novelist Rebecca Stott rediscovers Aristotle walking the shores of Lesbos with his pupils and Leonardo da Vinci searching for fossils in the mine shafts of the Tuscan hills; Diderot, in Paris, under the surveillance of the secret police, exploring the origins of species, and the brilliant naturalists of the Jardin de Plantes first recognising proof of evolutionary change in the natural history collections stolen during the Napoleonic wars.

Darwin's Ghosts is a masterful retelling of the collective daring of a few like-minded men who had the imagination to speculate on nature's ways and the courage to publish at a time when to do so, for political as well as religious reasons, was to risk everything. More than a tale of mummified birds, inland lagoons, Bedouin nomads, secret police files, microscopes and curiosity cabinets, Darwin's Ghosts is the story of an idea that would change the modern world.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1408809087
• ISBN 13: 9781408809082
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400