--Alva Johnston, The Legendary Mizners

Americans seemed to fascinate Picasso. Once, in Paris, he invited the Murphys to his apartment, on the Rue de la Boëtie, for an apéritif, and, after showing them through the place, in every room of which were pictures in various stages of completion, he led Gerald rather ceremoniously to an alcove that contained a tall cardboard box. "It was full of illustrations, photographs, engravings, and reproductions clipped from newspapers. All of them dealt with a single person--Abraham Lincoln. 'I've been collecting them since I was a child,' Picasso said, 'I have thousands, thousands!' He held up one of Brady's photographs of Lincoln, and said with great feeling, 'There is the real American elegance!' "
--Calvin Tomkins, Living Well Is the Best Revenge

We are all pebbles dropped in the sea of history, where the splash strikes one way and the big tides run another, and though what we feel is the splash, the splash takes place only within those tides. In almost every case, the incoming current drowns the splash; once in a while the drop of the pebble changes the way the ocean runs. On February 12, 1809, two baby boys were born within a few hours of each other on either side of the Atlantic. One entered life in a comfortable family home, nicely called the Mount, that still stands in the leafy English countryside of Shrewsbury, Shropshire; the other opened his eyes for the first time in a nameless long- lost log cabin in the Kentucky woods. Charles Darwin was the fifth of six children, born into comfort but to a family that was far from "safe," with a long history of freethinking and radical beliefs. He came into a world of learning and money--one grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, had made a fortune in ceramic plates. Abraham Lincoln was the second of three, born to a dirt- poor farmer, Thomas Lincoln, who, when he wrote his name at all, wrote it (his son recalled) "bunglingly."

Their narrow circles of immediate experience were held inside that bigger ocean of outlying beliefs and assumptions. In any era, there are truths that people take as obvious, stories that they think are weird or wrong, and dreams that they believe are distant or doomed. (We like stories about time travel and living robots, and even have some speculative thoughts about how they might be made to happen. But on the whole we believe that the time we're living in, and the way we live in it, is just the natural way things are. We like strange stories but believe only a few.) The obvious truths of 1809, the kind that were taught in school, involved what could be called a "vertical" organization of life, one in which we imagine a hierarchy of species organized on earth, descending from man on down toward animals, and a judge appraising us up above in heaven. Man was stuck in the middle, looking warily up and loftily down. People mostly believed that the kinds of organisms they saw on earth had always been here and always would be, that life had been fixed in place since the beginning of a terrestrial time, which was thought to go back a few thousand years at most. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment had, of course, already deepened a faith in Reason among the elite, but it was not a popular movement. It had altered many ideas without changing most minds. ( John Stuart Mill could say, as late as the 1850s, that he was still almost the only Englishman he knew who had not been brought up as a believer.) The Enlightenment ideal of Reason was in any case bound by taxonomies and hierarchies, absolute and extended right through earth and time. That the long history of life might be one driven by shifting coalitions of contingency,...

 

"[A]rresting....lively and wide-ranging....[Gopnik's] astute analysis...shows us why these thinkers and writers, who maintained 'a tragic consciousness without robbing it of a hopeful view,' have so robustly survived to our own time."

 

"entertaining....an introduction that brilliantly encapsulates ....Gopnik draws vividly characterized personal and intellectual portraits of each man....[he] has selected [the material] with a novelist's skill....Gopnik's writing is pungent, inventive and rich."

 

"[A] learned treatise that worships learning....Gopnik offers a meditation on each man's most literary qualities: Lincoln's deceptively simple legalistic language and Darwin's crystalline powers of observation....a succinct, convincing, and moving account of how two men ripped mankind out of its past unreason and thrust it into a more enlightened age."

 

"Gopnik casts fresh and honest light on two figures distorted by years of excessive comment, quotation, and ideological appropriation....[His] thesis is...an ambitious one, and he defends it well....[an] elegant book."

 

"Adam Gopnik celebrates....the beauty of a perfectly calibrated argument....Gopnik revels in the revolutionary ideas that helped create our 'moral modernity' as he reveals the complex characters who unearthed startling truths about nature, human and otherwise."

 

"elegant, intelligent meditation on skepticism and the making of the liberal mind....intriguing hypothesis--that [Lincoln and Darwin] weren't ever, actually, in natural conflict: The real enemy of religion isn't science, [Gopnik] says, it's history."

 

"thoughtful meditation on the contemporary meaning of the lives of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln....[Gopnik] offers an eloquent and elegant comparison of two great men, expounding on how they achieved their stature and what their accomplishments mean for us today....a profound discussion of the relationship between faith and science....Gopnik's examination of these two men leads to nothing less than the exploration of what it means to live a meaningful life....Gopnik...distilled knowledge of an enormous set of biographical facts to come to some far-reaching conclusions about what it means to be human....amazing work of scholarship and philosophical thought."

 

"[From] one of our best essayists....[with] overwhelming truths....Angels and Ages makes a persuasive case that our liberal, bourgeois lives, resting on reason, law, and the primacy of science, rest also on Darwin and Lincoln....it is...powerful [and] emotional...covering breathtaking acreage with trenchant flair."

 

"perceptive, very articulate author....intriguing treatise, appealing to a popular audience as the nation and world celebrate the bicentennial of this duo's birth."

 

 

Angels and Ages by Adam Gopnik
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