While looking for something else at the local library -- a research item for Bogus Science -- I spotted Tim M. Berra's Charles Darwin: The Concise Story of an Extraordinary Man (2009) on the Recent Acquisitions display. Since I remembered enjoying Berra's Evolution and the Myth of Creationism and since I'd just finished reading James Scott Bell's dire pro-Intelligent Design novel The Darwin Conspiracy (more about which later), and since I realized I'd never read a Darwin bio, and since Berra's new book is even more concise than the title suggests . . . well, home it went.
This is a really jolly little book, beautifully designed with lots of illustrations, and very nicely written. Based on a lecture Berra's apparently been delivering at regular intervals for some while, it gave me just enough for it to qualify as a genuine biography without very much excess. Plenty of interesting facts came out -- for example, I hadn't realized (or, more accurately, hadn't remembered) that the Beagle's voyage lasted just short of five years, or that Darwin laboured a full eight years of his prime working life classifying 10,000 species of barnacles ("I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before," he declared midway through), or that Darwin shared the same birthday, February 12 1809, with Abraham Lincoln -- a black day for bigots everywhere! And so on.
I'm quite reluctant to let the book go back to the library, in fact. At some point when I'm feeling a bit richer (its cover price of $20 is quite steep for something so small, however much it may be perfectly formed) I must pick up my very own copy to cuddle and cosset.
