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Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
Audiobook7 hours

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

Written by Adam Gopnik

Narrated by Adam Gopnik

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this audiobook

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.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 27, 2009
ISBN9781440708428
Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life

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Reviews for Angels and Ages

Rating: 3.6418917702702704 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Starts out poorly, gets more and more interesting, and then concludes fatuously. I listened to an audiobook, the author reads his own work. He makes Darwin sound very pert, and as far as I can remember, gives Lincoln no special voice at all. I think he is trying to sneak up on his thesis just like Darwin did in the "Origin of Species", but, because his thesis is pretty much empty, that does not work so well. The parallels that are drawn between the two famous contemporaries are not nearly as forced as one would expect them to be.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very nice book. I care a lot more about Darwin than Lincoln, but I learned about both and it was interesting to see them compared. The last summary chapter was a little too abstract and hand-wavy for me, but overall a fine book.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    The thesis of this book seems to be that both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin contributed to modern life in ways beyond the obvious. This book reads like an essay...no footnotes...and pursues various related ideas about religion, war, masterful use of language and society. This is the kind of book that frustrates me because it appears to be written to show what the writer knows rather than to engage the reader. I'm an expert neither in Lincoln/American History nor Darwin/science. I had trouble following the author's points because he dropped in names or other references without explaining them or giving any context.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a great read, especially on Lincoln. Gopnik understands what Lincoln's view of life was, and how important the law and Shakespeare was to his rhetoric. This is a splendid read for me who has visited the Soldiers Home in Washington,where Lincoln spent the summer months, and Springfield Illinois, where the parks service has a great tour of the man's house and outbuildings. As far as Darwin is concerned, I knew nothing of him or his works, and now will read some, influenced by Gopnik. The author seems to argue that the individual religious experience can control life, while science goes its merry way. He does not like fundamentalists, nor do I, and he argues persuasively that they are crazy.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An excellent small book very well written and thought out. Although the characters are used to illustrate a grander point, it is an important meditation especially on Lincoln.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Gopnik takes a simple conceit, the fact that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day, and uses this as a launching point for a discursive, free form essay, about each man's contribution to the age of modernity. Gopnik praises Lincoln for his ability to distil complex legal arguments into a simple message any man could grasp. Too bad he cannot emulate his hero in this respect. Gopnik says his book is short, but at 200 pages it's a hundred pages too long. This would have been much better had it remained a New Yorker essay. The book rambles and Gopnik wears his erudition on his sleeve. Not an author I will be revisiting.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Adam Gopnik is a writer for the 'New Yorker' and has written this small book which contains dual biography of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln which he ties together because they were both born on 12 February 1809. In his two essays the author analyzes what he sees as their influence on modern society. He contends that these two men introduced what we know as the liberal modern age with Lincoln's speeches and Darwin’s writings. That these were the men and vehicles used to spread the new ideas that formed modern society. As a dual historical biography he fails but as two separate essays they would be excellent for publication within the pages of the magazine he works for. Or if you are just looking for a casual introduction into these two men it would be worth reading.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    My annual Lincoln/Darwin Day reading is a short book published for the bicentennial of their birth. This book is an extended rumination on the lives of two men born on the same day who helped create the modern world. Gopnik sees both Lincoln and Darwin as men of words, Lincoln with speech and rhetoric and Darwin with his novelistic prose. The title and a major issue upon which Gopnik builds his narrative is the debate of Edward Stanton's eulogy for Lincoln, whether he said "Now he belongs to the angels" or "Now he belongs to the ages." This book is an interesting but not essential addition to the literature about these two fascinating men.Favorite Passages:"The thesis is that literary eloquence is essential to liberal civilization; our heroes should be men and women possessed by the urgency of utterance, obsessed by the need to see for themselves and to speak for us all. Authoritarian societies can rely on an educated elite; mere mass society, on shared dumb show. Liberal cities can't. A commitment to persuasion is in itself a central liberal principle. New ways of thinking demand new kinds of eloquence. Our world rests on science and democracy, on seeing and saying; it rests on thinking new thoughts and getting them heard by a lot of people." p. 22"The attempt to make Lincoln into just one more racist is part of the now common attempt to introduce a noxious equilibrium between minds and parties: liberals who struggle with their own prejudices are somehow equal in prejudice to those who never took the trouble to make the struggle. Imperfect effort at being just is no different from perfect indifference to it." -p. 49"... for the first time, and despite much conventional religious piety -- there's a nascent sence throughout the liberal world that the deaths of young men in war will never be justified in the eyes of a good God, and never compensated for by a meeting in another world. Their deaths can be made meaningful only through a vague idea of Providence and through the persistence of a living ideal." - p. 120
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I really liked this book, it shows how two men from very different backgrounds showed the way to our age. Both Darwin and Lincoln, sharing the same birthday, were products of the enlightment. Certainly more for Darwin, but each of them using reason expanded the spirital values of the world. A wonderful read
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Celebrating Two Great MenEssayist Adam Gopnik attempts to tackle the connections between intellectuals Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, both born on 1809 (coinciding with the bicentennial anniversary). The title "Angels and Ages" refers to the dispute over what Edwin Stanton was alleged to have said over Lincoln's deathbed "Now he belongs to the ages?" or "Now he belongs to the angels?" Gopnick dovetails this analogy to Darwin's from "ape or angels?" referring to the perpetual debate between Science and God.The book is read like an extended essay, just over 200 pages. I thought the sections about Darwin were better written and argued overall, whereas the Lincoln sections appeared to be incomplete. Although, I think one could argue that it was simply due to the vast differences between their respective bodies of work, Darwin was an intellectual, Lincoln led one of the most consequential wars in US history.Overall, I thought this was a very well-thought out, well-argued essay about two of the most influential people in mankind. The connections between the two are more abstract than real, but Gopnik does a good job weaving through the analogies. A good read for an afternoon or two for sure.