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Angels And Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, And Modern Life (2009)

by Adam Gopnik(Favorite Author)

3.48 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0307270785 (ISBN13: 9780307270788)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Knopf

review 1: This not a history book. It's a story about two consequential historical figures, Darwin and Lincoln, who led profoundly compelling lives. Instead of facts, dates, and interesting tidbits of information, it's a story that makes you think ...it's intellectual ...and quite well-written ...thought provoking. Some may find this kind of presentation dry when they're expecting mere biographies; it is so much more than just a narration of life events. Two men, who were coincidentally born on exactly the same day, led extraordinarily consequential lives in numerous ways we may have not considered.
review 2: This book was a joy, and I thoroughly recommend it for any history nerd looking for some light yet thoughtful summer reading. Angels and Ages will satisfy your inte... morellectual thirst without giving you a headache (with its density) or a backache (with its, um, density?), and that's our version of Fifty Shades of Grey, right?Gopnik is a delightfully erudite writer who at some point noticed that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on exactly the same day, and decided that was a good enough reason to write a book about both of them. While he pushes his rather random hook a bit far -- the underlying case he tries to make is that the ways in which Lincoln and Darwin changed the world are ideologically and generationally connected, and that their lives were in some ways mirrors of one another (which therefore justifies the notion of writing a book about both of them together based solely on their shared birthday) -- we can forgive him for pushing his point given the fantastically crisp and eloquent several essays on the two men that he delivers.Angels and Ages turns out to be, on a macro level, a rumination on the Western world's turn towards Liberalism (capital L) after the Enlightenment, and, on a micro level, fascinatingly, a book about diction, word-choice, and writing style. Specifically, the dictions, word-choices, and writing styles of the two historical giants that he's treating. Beneath Gopnik's fundamental points about why Lincoln and Darwin were able to change the world in the ways they did runs a fantastically brilliant exploration of what it means to be a good writer, and the almost unspoken theory that neither men would've accomplished what they accomplished had they not had such a poetic command of the English language. Lincoln was a war leader, and Darwin a scientist (or "naturalist", as he was called), and neither would first and foremost be thought of as a writer. But to Gopnik that's not only what they were, it's the reason they were able to do what they did. Their other talents were only able to move mountains thanks to their abilities to put pen to paper in such a way that dazzled, and convinced, the reader (in the case of Darwin) and the listener (in the case of Lincoln). It's not the conclusion I expected out of this little book when I picked it up, but he sold me on it; everything else was gravy. I'm witholding five stars only because at 200 pages (small pages at that, with largish font), it really is a slight book, good for a weekend's read on the beach, but not quite substantial enough to stand with the greats. less

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