I may have read too many things about books in a row, or maybe I've read too much about Darwin in general, but I didn't love this book. For someone else, it would probably be a much better rating.

Not necessarily recommended for casual readers on the subject. However, those who have an interest in Darwin, science, or this subject of history could find this title enjoyable. Those who have read previous books or have studies these topics would also enjoy this title. Perhaps not a recommendation for public libraries; however, it could be a good addition to academic libraries.

A fantastic, well researched, fun read. Sheds light on evolution, history, racism, the Civil War and more. Highly recommended!

In the months after John Brown's execution, America's public intellectuals got their hand on a provocative new book from the UK: Darwin's Origin of Species. First sent to Asa Gray, Harvard's pioneer botanist, it quickly passed to Gray's cousin-in-law Charles Loring Brace (of slum reform and Orphan Trains), who took it to a dinner party with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (recently returned from fleeing the country after sending money and guns to Brown). This is fascinating both for the study of transmission of information along networks of interested people as well as the way that each absorbed Darwin's ideas about plants and animals and applied them to their own fields--in some cases igniting more ferocious embrace of abolition, in others, looking for ways to help people adapt to changing environments like ultra-crowded New York City. Ironically, of course, the Confederacy's founding documents included the idea that Africans were better adapted to work in hot climates, a perversion of how the idea had been received by Gray's circle of friends.

I received a free electronic copy of this history from Netgalley, Randall Fuller, and Penguin Group Viking in exchange for an honest review. Thank you all, for sharing your hard work with me.

I forget, over time, just how busy the mid-1800s were with new breakthroughs in knowledge and excellent writers bringing their ideas to the world. 1859 and 1860 saw publications by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry David Thoreau, John Stewart Mills, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and many others as well as Charles Darwin. Scientists were still called philosophers and medicine was primitive, civil war was pending and John Brown was hanged. Concord was a hotbed of American writers - and it is through them that we measure the impact of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for life.

The Alcott family, The Thoreau's, the Elliots, were all made aware of the Darwin book brought and shared at a dinner party at the Franklin Sanborns in Concord by Charles Loring Brace. Asa Gray, a professor at Harvard, had received a copy of the book from Charles Darwin and shared it with his cousin by marriage, Brace who then passed it around in Concord. It's reception was colorful, and varied. The passion with which it was received or denied never faltered, even with the war all around them. And it never stopped. The science might have carried on it's own merit were not religion so ingrained in our society.

And still today, there is often an addendum to the book, stating quite clearly that it is presented as THEORY, not necessarily a fact. A very interesting read, one I will keep and dip into again at my leisure.

BookFilter link:
http://bookfilter.com/2016/05/02/the-book-that-changed-america/

BookFilter review: The lightning bolt, the Big Bang of modern science that was Charles Darwin's publication of "On The Origin Of Species" is given its due in this engaging work of history, which might just as easily have been dubbed "The Book That Changed The World." Like Pulitzer Prize winner Louis Menand's "The Metaphysical Club," Fuller uses the hook of Darwin's book to offer a group portrait of American thinkers and writers. We implicitly understand the importance of the Theory of Evolution on science, but Fuller awakens us again to its impact on all the sciences, not to mention philosophy, literature, politics, society at large and the ever-volatile issue of slavery. He shows how Darwin's ideas were immediately seized upon by abolitionists. Even though Darwin cautiously avoided discussing the theory's implications on the origins of people, it was obvious to everyone where his ideas led and how they reinforced the common humanity of all people. Fine, but Fuller then shows the dismay -- the buyer's remorse even -- of many ardent abolitionists as they wrestled with Darwin's work and how it challenged and undercut their faith, seeming to relegate God to observer. Fuller shows this passionate turmoil cutting a swath far and wide but especially in the group of Transcendentalists and their friends, people like Emerson and Thoreau and the Harvard botanist Asa Gray (Darwin's most able defender in the US) right down to the talented young writer Louisa May Alcott, who was far readier than her well-intentioned father to see Darwin's ideas to their logical conclusion and wrote about interracial romance in an early novel. Even those who fancied themselves scientists were confounded, for Darwin's approach in his book was the most radical of all. Forever after, science would involve facts and data and theories that could be tested and proven and which led to speculation that could and must be proven again and then all of it checked independently by others. This was shockingly new. Philosophical musings, untestable speculations and appeals to the Almighty had no place in science and Darwin is the reason such an obvious (to us) necessity won the day. Towards the end, Fuller is juggling so many characters that he gets a little lost -- we jump in time again and again, from well after the Civil War to its beginnings, from one person's death to another person's signal event years earlier and so on. It's a tad muddled, but all resolves in a lovely image of Thoreau seeing the wide open possibilities, the horizon that Darwin drew everyone's eye to for the very first time, though it was always there. -- Michael Giltz