Charles Darwin: The Power of Place
by Janet Browne
The Power of Place is volume two of Harvard historian Janet Browne’s biography of Charles Darwin. Part one is called Charles Darwin: Voyaging.
Recommendations from our site
“She succeeds in giving us a full picture of the man but…it bites the genre and expands it….she also underscores throughout her book the importance of the infrastructure, ranging from the postal system to his home, wife and children, that subtend these collective networks. Her biography is even more generous than most group biographies in that it changes how we must think about ‘life and work.’ In the first pages, she tells us explicitly that Darwin ‘not only lived his own life, he lived also in the lives of others.’ She is not only thinking about human lives. More radically, she ends the book not with Darwin’s own death, but with that of his dog, Polly, a few days later.” Read more...
Jimena Canales, Historian
