Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America Hardcover - 2009

Media reviews

Advance praise for Banquet at Delmonico’s

“Barry Werth has written a banquet of a book, a sumptuous feast of distinctive characters and delicious vignettes that places evolution indelibly at the center of Gilded Age controversy.”
–Christopher Benfey, author of The Great Wave and A Summer of Hummingbirds

“Few ideas have had a bigger (or sorrier) impact than the nineteenth-century notion that nations and races are engaged in a survival of the fittest–and that the Anglo-Saxons are the fittest of them all. By telling the story through a few shrewdly chosen and thoroughly fascinating people, Werth animates an idea and brings to life a memorable age.”
–Evan Thomas, author of Sea of Thunder and Robert Kennedy

“What a thrilling ride Barry Werth takes us on! His narrative history of the triumph of Darwinism in America has some of the qualities of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia: one bold character and striking scene after another, all in the service of a single great idea whose repercussions are still being felt today.”
–Anthony Giardina, author of Recent History and White Guys

“A rich, entertaining slab of Victorian American history, focused on the debate over evolution . . . Histories of ideas are rarely page-turners, but Werth has done the trick.”
–Kirkus Reviews (starred review)