David Quammen

Charles Darwin’s two-hundredth birthday is coming up, and in celebration comes a flurry of books about his life and work. This biography is an absorbing exploration of the life of a man who never allowed himself to be blinded by that which consumed his life—science. Quammen, a nature and travel journalist, who wrote Outside magazine’s witty “Natural Acts” column for fifteen years, humanizes the infamous Darwin with details of his personality and anecdotes about the endless and odd experiments that helped to develop and prove science’s most scrutinized theory.