Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist

Hardly a year has passed since the centennial of the Origin of Species in 1959 in which one or two books on Charles Darwin have not appeared. Fortunately, there is not much overlap among them, and each fills a somewhat different niche. The new Darwin biography by Adrian Desmond and James Moore is likewise unique in many respects. With its 808 pages, it is clearly the longest and most detailed. It is also characterized -- for better or for worse -- by the authors' strictly chronologic approach, reporting, almost day by day, everything that happened in Darwin's life, as far . . .