The Evolution of Charles Darwin: The Epic Voyage of the Beagle That Forever Changed Our View of Life on Earth

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Ms. Preston's conference narrative abjures authorial hindsight judgments, placing the spotlight instead on the characters' natural blind spots and biases. She also devotes a full third of the book to the summit's historical context and personalities, the latter of which are nicely developed."-- Wall Street Journal An engaging narrative . . . Rich in detail and texture.” — San Diego Union Tribune, on Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima With the deep insight of a skilled historian, drawing on the memorable accounts of those who were there—from the leaders and high level advisors such as Averell Harriman, Anthony Eden, and Andrei Gromyko, to Churchill’s clear-eyed secretary Marian Holmes and FDR’s insightful daughter Anna Boettiger—Diana Preston has, on the 75th anniversary of this historic event, crafted a masterful and vivid chronicle of the conference that created the post-war world, out of which came decisions that still resonate loudly today. Deciding to write about Charles Darwin himself was a natural progression. Just as Dampier’s transition from pirate to pioneer of descriptive zoology and botany intrigued me, so did Darwin’s personal evolution during the Beagle voyage. The more I read – especially Darwin’s shipboard diary, the small notebooks he filled during those five years and his many letters home – the clearer the impact of the voyage became. Lively and nuanced . . . Shrewd on the main personalities . . . Preston goes beyond the horse-trading of three old men, with vivid scene-setting of the tsarist palaces where the conference took place."-- Times (UK)

I learned some new things and that's the first half of a good nonfiction book. The second half would be, Did you enjoy learning those new things? ...Yeah, mostly. From the Los Angeles Times Book Prize-winning historian, the colorful, dramatic story of Charles Darwin's journey on HMS Beagle that inspired the evolutionary theories in his path-breaking books On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man

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Darwin never left Britain again after his return in 1836, though his mind journeyed far and wide to develop the theories that were first revealed, after great delay and with trepidation about their reception, in 1859 with the publication of his epochal book On the Origin of Species . Offering a unique portrait of one of history's most consequential figures, The Evolution of Charles Darwin is a vital contribution to our understanding of life on Earth. The Evolution of Charles Darwin: The Epic Voyage of the Beagle That Forever Changed Our View of Life on Earthby Diana Prestonis published on 17 November, 2022. However, thanks to Grant, Darwin got to hear the renowned American ornithologist John James Audubon lecture on North American birds. His talk inspired Darwin to take lessons from a taxidermist— a negro … a very pleasant and intelligent man—who made his living teaching university students at the cost of a guinea a term how to preserve dead animals. His lodgings were just a few doors from Darwin’s. His name was John Edmonstone, and he was a former enslaved man, now freed—Edmonstone being the name of his former owner in Guyana. He had accompanied Edmonstone’s friend, explorer and naturalist Charles Waterton, in his travels through the South American jungle. Waterton had taught him taxidermy. The voyage marked an evolution in Darwin himself. The more facts he gathered—and he was, throughout his life, an inveterate list maker—the more ideas came into his head. Many of these would have seemed heretical to the embryo clergyman he had been when he sailed, not doubting the literal truth of the biblical picture of Creation. For most of the voyage Darwin thought of himself as primarily a geologist. However, in its latter stages he turned increasingly to biology and zoology. As the Beagle finally headed for home, he was already making notes on how species changed, though it would be many years before he felt confident enough to reveal his ideas about evolution publicly and face the storm of hostility he knew they would provoke. Integral to his thinking was the interrelationship between living organisms and their environment, making him a pioneer of what we today call ecology. ¹

A] meticulously researched compelling narrative . . . Diana Preston's vibrant reconstruction of Darwin's extraordinary journey, world-changing work and the consequences he experienced makes it all accessible and new in her telling."-- Janet Somerville, Toronto Star

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He embraced new experiences, sampling his first banana in the Cape Verde Islands and drinking tortoise urine in the Galapagos. He coped well in harsh climates such as the extreme cold of remote Tierra del Fuego. Such resilience seemed interestingly at odds with the semi-invalid he became not long after his return to England. When twenty-two-year-old aspiring geologist Charles Darwin boarded HMS Beagle in 1831 with his microscopes and specimen bottles—invited by ship’s captain Robert FitzRoy who wanted a travel companion at least as much as a ship’s naturalist—he hardly thought he was embarking on what would become perhaps the most important and epoch-changing voyage in scientific history. Preston is sympathetic to Darwin's long delay in publishing his theory, until Wallace was nipping at his heels. Compare her treatment of this topic to Paul Johnson's, still my gold standard for a short Darwin bio: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Darwin never left Britain again after his return in 1836, though his mind journeyed far and wide to develop the theories that were first revealed, after great delay and with trepidation about their reception, in 1859 with the publication of his epochal book On the Origin of Species. Offering a unique portrait of one of history's most consequential figures, The Evolution of Charles Darwin is a vital contribution to our understanding of life on Earth. Charles Darwin’s first diagram of an evolutionary tree from his First Notebook on Transmutation of Species, 1837: Wikimedia (public domain) Exactly 163 years later, and in the very same venue, historian Diana Preston will discuss the dramatic debate and the key events leading up to it; part of the subject of her new book, The Evolution of Charles Darwin: The Epic Voyage of the 'Beagle'.Cover: The Evolution of Charles Darwin, THE EPIC VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE THAT FOREVER CHANGED OUR VIEW OF LIFE ON EARTH by Diana Preston

At first Darwin relied almost exclusively on the company of his brother, four years his senior. However, when Erasmus left Edinburgh the following year, Charles made efforts to broaden his circle. His interest in the natural sciences was growing, and he made friends with several like-minded young men. He also began attending lectures on zoology given by the thirty-three-year-old Dr. Robert Grant, a well-traveled polymath who, while originally qualifying as a medical doctor, now lectured on invertebrate animals. Grant was interested in the connections between plants and animals and, in particular, whether primitive organisms might have the characteristics of both. To add to FitzRoy’s worries, one of the young men died of smallpox despite, like the others, having been vaccinated against the disease in Montevideo and again upon arriving in England. ³ I … could not but feel how much I was implicated in shortening his existence, FitzRoy lamented. The death reinforced his determination to honor his commitment to take his surviving three guests home. In the end he saw no option but to pay to charter a small merchant ship, John of London, to carry him and his party to South America. Unforgettable . . . The definitive account of the Lusitania.”— Philadelphia Inquirer, on Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy The uncertain young man destined at his father’s urging for a career in the church who embarked in December 1831 was quite different from the confident figure who returned in 1836 determined to make his name in science.

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Henslow held weekly Friday evening soirees at his modest house for undergraduates and academics interested in science, to which Fox secured his cousin an invitation. Darwin relished these gatherings, becoming a regular attendee and, before long, Henslow’s friend. Nearly every day he accompanied the professor on long rambles so that, as Darwin recalled in the autobiography he wrote for his family late in his life, he became known as the man who walks with Henslow. What impressed him was Henslow’s excellent judgment and intellectual breadth—his knowledge of botany, entomology, mineralogy, and geology was extensive—and the way he based his conclusions upon long-continued minute observations, a practice Darwin himself would adopt. Over succeeding months FitzRoy’s sometimes violent and usually mutually unsatisfactory encounters with the Fuegians convinced him that so long as we were ignorant of the Fuegian language, and the natives were equally ignorant of ours, we should never know much about them … nor would there be the slightest chance of their being raised one step above the low place which they then held in our estimation. He conceived a plan to take some Fuegians to England to be educated in Christianity and British ways before being returned to their homeland as a catalyst for civilizing others. By a variety of methods he inveigled aboard a little girl around nine years old and three young men, quieting any twinges of conscience by attempting to make sure his social experimentees understood that one day they would return.