Book description
This biography of Charles Darwin attempts to capture the private
unknown life of the real man - the gambling and gluttony at Cambridge,
his gruelling trip round the globe, his intimate family life, worries
about persecution and thoughts about God. Central to all of this, his
pioneering efforts on the theory of evolution now that recent studies
have overturned the commonplace views of Darwin that have held for more
than a century.
Adrian Desmond studied at London University and Harvard, has higher
degrees in vertebrate palaeontology and the history of science, and a
Ph. D. for his work on Victorian evolution. He is an Honorary Research
Fellow in the Biology Department at University College London. Adrian
Desmond's bestselling Darwin (Penguin, 1992, written with James
Moore), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in Britain, the Grand
Comisso Prize in Italy and the Watson Davis Prize from the History of
Science Society in America. In 1997 the British Society for the
History of Science awarded it the first Dingle Prize for the best book
of the decade in communicating the history of science to a wide
audience. His study of the pre-Darwinian generation, The Politics of
Evolution (1989), received the Pfizer Award from the History of
Science Society. He has also published The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs
(1975), The Ape's Reflexion (1979) and Archetypes and Ancestors
(1982). In 1993 the Society for the History of Natural History awarded
him its Founders' Medal.
James Moore is a reader in history of science and technology at the
Open University.
