Charles Darwin: The Power of Place

"Disclosures first: Browne is a mentor and friend, so I know a little more about how her personal interests intersected with historiographic preoccupations that drive her narrative. She succeeds in giving us a full picture of the man but, like my own Einstein bio, it bites the genre and expands it. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes, she does, and she also underscores throughout her book the importance of the infrastructure, ranging from the postal system to his home, wife and children, that subtend these collective networks. Her biography is even more generous than most group biographies in that it changes how we must think about “life and work.” In the first pages, she tells us explicitly that Darwin “not only lived his own life, he lived also in the lives of others.” She is not only thinking about human lives. More radically, she ends the book not with Darwin’s own death, but with that of his dog, Polly, a few days later."