Charles Darwin: The Naturalist Who Started a Scientific Revolution (2002) By Cyril Aydon

Like many biographers, author Cyril Aydon fawns over his subject, Charles Darwin. but It’s easy to understand why.  Darwin’s famous journey on the second Voyage of the HMS Beagle, encapsulates everything a wide-eyed person could ask for: adventure, discovery, nature and science – an early example of “join the Navy, and see the world.” 

From a wealthy family, and well educated, Darwin was not a sailor.  He earned his place on the Beagle because of its need for a trained geologist – the primary purpose of the voyage was to survey the coasts of South America and the South Pacific – areas “discovered” by earlier explorers, including: William Dampier, Captain James Cook, and Sir Francis Drake.  Darwin would keep a journal of the voyage and serve as collector of animal specimens, duties that would earn him a place in history.  

The log ended up covering five years, 1831 to 1836, as the ship circled the globe, though what is remembered most by history is the five weeks spent surveying the Galapagos Islands, 600 miles west of Ecuador.  His specimen collections and keen observations on the oddity of the animal wildlife in the Galapagos would linger in his mind.  Later, after returning to Scotland, those memories would form the thesis of what is arguably the most important scientific book of the all-time, On the Origin of Species, first published in late 1859.  The impact of the book was the development of the theory of evolution – still debated, by some, to this day.

Last summer I blogged on The Immense Journey (1957) Part I from the Library of America book Loren Eiseley: Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos.  Like Darwin, Eiseley was multi-faceted, an anthropologist, naturalist, and budding astronomer. Parts II and III of the Collected Essays, The Firmament of Time and The Unexpected Universe contain several of Eiseley’s essays dissecting the evolutionary debate as it continued into the middle of the 20TH Century.  These essays compliment the Darwin biography quite well.

Recommendation:  Yes, definitely. The first half of the Darwin biography covers the voyage and reads like a first-class adventure novel, and the second half, covering the publication of On the Origin of Species and its explosive reception in the scientific community is equally compelling.  And I’ll also give a second favorable recommendation to Loren Eiseley: Collected Essays.

Empire of the Sun (1984) By J. G. Ballard

I guess I’m developing a new favored genre because Empire of the Sun fits comfortably with several other of my reads over the past few years, let’s call it the Pacific Theatre genre.  This story is perhaps better known because of the Steven Spielberg movie of the same name – both the book and movie are excellent. The book, and to a lesser extent the movie, is depressing from its opening chapters.  It is also completely engrossing.

The plot is how a 10-year British boy, living in the International Settlement near the Bund (Huangpu River front) of Shanghai, gets separated from his parents as the Japanese invade the city concurrent with the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  He survives the duration of the war in a prisoner of war camp on the outskirts of the city, his parents, if they are still alive, are in a different camp.  While the British and citizens of multiple other colonial powers are prisoners in these camps, they also realize that their Japanese captors are the only thing protecting them from the Chinese peasants – “coolies” who for decades have been virtual slave labor to the Europeans.

Childhood, spent under Japanese occupation and/or imprisonment is also the “big picture” theme of the excellent The Gift of Rain and The Garden of Evening Mists, both by Tan Twan Eng, and set in the author’s native Malaysia.  They, like Empire, have a fascinating psychological subtext involving the personal relationship between captive and captor.  In Jane Gardam’s Old Filth, the British boy, this time from Kotakinakulu (Malaysia) is sent, alone, back to Britain just before the onset of the war.  While all of these books are excellent and important reads, The Gift of Rain stands out as the best – I’d love for Spielberg to make it into a movie.

I’m not normally complimentary of movies as they too often tend to rewrite the story to commercially fit a larger audience, who after all are in the theater for entertainment, not a history lesson.  In Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, rewrites are kept to a minimum, tweaking only to make the film fit, not to change the plot.    

Movie Trailer

Perhaps because the movie was true to the book, Empire of the Sun did not rake in any major Academy Award nominations.  This is a pity because John Malkovich was stellar in the film; and Christian Bale, who as a child himself played the lead role of Shanghai Jim -- who aged from 10 to 14 during the book -- was shamefully overlooked because of the Academy’s historic tendency to devalue the work of child actors.

Recommendation:  Watch the movie, and read the book if you are a history major – and by all means, read The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng.

The Gilded Age (1873) by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

The subtitle of The Gilded Age says it all: A Tale of Today.  When Mark Twain and his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner penned their book, that "today" was 1873, and the country was recovering from the Civil War, "reconstructing" the South, and stretching ever westward with its railroads. The book was so successful at portraying the country, that it gave name to an era of American history.

It was a era of endless ambition, often blind; an unprecedented accumulation and flaunting of wealth by an oligarchy; institutionalized poverty, viewed indifferently; and corporate greed on a monumental scale, greased by compliant and highly creative governmental corruption. In other words, it was much like today, 2018.

While the book includes unmistakable political commentary, it’s bigger picture is a social commentary on a nation of people looking at unlimited opportunity, yet frequently forsaking it with a mad quest for immediate gratification, and a single-minded worship of the dollar, and little else.

The key storyline of book involves the ownership by the Hawkins family of a large tract of land in eastern Tennessee.  Unable to immediately make much of the land, they, like others in the post war period, follow the path of westward expansion to Missouri, then the gateway to the frontier. There they attempt one get-rich scheme after another, and fail at them all.  Importantly however, the elder Hawkins maintains ownership of the Tennessee land, and reminds his children that it would one day make them rich.

“Cashing in” on that land is the main plot of the book, and it goes like this (an over-simplification). The U.S. Senator from Missouri, working with the Hawkins family, devises a plan to create an economic development tract on the Tennessee property to help recently emancipated black folk.  This benevolent goal however is never anything more than a public relations cover for a scheme which in its fine print enriches everyone but the poor black folk. 

Looking at this 135 years later, what you have is a how-to manual for the recent so-called reform Tax Cut and Jobs Act – a nice sounding name for a huge tax break for corporations and the already wealthy, with table scraps for the middle class and further service cuts for the poor.  In the book, just like two weeks ago, the bill is even legislatively advanced in the middle of the night, with no one having a chance to even read the bill they were voting on.  And, as much as I’d like to pin this strategy on the current administration (on loan from Goldman Sachs), this legislative blueprint has been used multiple times in U.S. history – because “we the people” haven’t stopped it.

Recommendation:  Yes.  The book is vintage Mark Twain and completely readable.