Angels and Ages, Adam Gopnik
Angels and Ages, Adam Gopnik
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Angels and Ages
A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life

Author: Adam Gopnik

Narrator: Adam Gopnik

Unabridged: 7 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 02/27/2009


Synopsis

On a memorable day in human history, February 12, 1809, two babies were born an ocean apart: Abraham Lincoln in a one-room Kentucky log cabin; Charles Darwin on an English country estate. It was a time of backward-seeming notions, when almost everyone still accepted the biblical account of creation as the literal truth and authoritarianism as the most natural and viable social order. But by the time both men died, the world had changed: ordinary people understood that life on earth was a story of continuous evolution, and the Civil War had proved that a democracy could fight for principles and endure. And with these signal insights much else had changed besides. Together, Darwin and Lincoln had become midwives to the spirit of a new world, a new kind of hope and faith. Searching for the men behind the icons of emancipation and evolution, Adam Gopnik shows us, in this captivating double life, Lincoln and Darwin as they really were: family men and social climbers; ambitious manipulators and courageous adventurers; the living husband, father, son, and student behind each myth. How do we reconcile Lincoln, the supremely good man we know, with the hardened commander who wittingly sent tens of thousands of young soldiers to certain death? Why did the relentlessly rational Darwin delay publishing his "Great Idea" for almost twenty years? How did inconsolable grief at the loss of a beloved child change each man? And what comfort could either find-for himself or for a society now possessed of a sadder, if wiser, understanding of our existence? Such human questions and their answers are the stuff of this book. Above all, we see Lincoln and Darwin as thinkers and writers-as makers and witnesses of the great change in thought that marks truly modern times: a hundred years after the Enlightenment, the old rule of faith and fear finally yielding to one of reason, argument, and observation not merely as intellectual ideals but as a way of life; the judgment of divinity at last submitting to the verdicts of history and time. Lincoln considering human history, Darwin reflecting on deep time-both reshaped our understanding of what life is and how it attains meaning. And they invented a new language to express that understanding. Angels and Ages is an original and personal account of the creation of the liberal voice-of the way we live now and the way we talk at home and in public. Showing that literary eloquence is essential to liberal civilization, Adam Gopnik reveals why our heroes should be possessed by the urgency of utterance, obsessed by the need to see for themselves, and endowed with the gift to speak for us all.

About Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1986. He has published many books including Paris to the Moon. He lives in New York City.


Reviews

Goodreads review by micah on March 03, 2009

If constructions like this make sense to you Art is "experience & observation" in the sense, one gathers, that it can record behavior without supplying explanation--we don't need to know what causes Hamlet to find him interesting. then dig in, he's got hundreds. If you're sitting there thinking, well......more

Goodreads review by Särah on July 18, 2011

It turns out that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin have much more in common than a shared birthday. New Yorker journalist Adam Gopnik proves this with Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life, a book of great insight and educative value, and an inside look into the human......more

Goodreads review by Bandit on October 09, 2015

I was interested primarily in the first two topics, two fascinating and eminent figures, for the purposes of this book united by their shared year of birth and their undeniable historical significance. For the purposes of concise biographical sketches, this book served its purpose, however this wasn......more

Goodreads review by Rosemarie on December 15, 2020

On February 12 1809, two men who would change history were born. Adam Gopnik, a writer for The New Yorker compares and contrasts the lives, philosophies, struggles and triumphs of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. What started out as two separate articles were merged and tweaked and became this 20......more

Goodreads review by William on December 04, 2012

Adam Gopnik's "Angels and Ages" draws its title from conflicting reports on the impromptu eulogy spoken by the grief-stricken Edwin Stanton, Abraham Lincoln's secretary of war, when the grievously wounded president was pronounced dead in 1865. To Gopnik, the key question is: did Stanton say "now he b......more