Sunday, May 6, 2007

A review of Sandra Herbert's Charles Darwin, Geologist.

First two paragraphs of review:"I have long believed that too many books have been written onDarwin and Darwinism. His career has been picked over frominnumerable angles, and one might well think that there is nothingnew to be said about him. To an extent this was true (in myjudgment) even before the publication of Sandra Herbert’s finebook. But she has added substantially to the Darwin edifice in thatshe focuses on a major aspect of his work that has not, hitherto,been written about as a connected whole, despite the fact that inhis early days Darwin thought of himself as a geologist andreferred to himself thus. In Charles Darwin, Geologist, then, wenow have a detailed, readable, and admirably scholarly account of(just about) all of Darwin’s geological work, in a substantial and(I hope culminating) addition to the Darwin literature.

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