Charles Darwin

Drawing upon a huge array of sources, including previously unpublished material, the author brings us Darwin's childhood years; his long scientific apprenticeship at sea aboard the Beagle; his triumphs and travails as a husband and father, and as a dogged researcher contending with almost continuous ill-health. This volume illuminates how this great figure of 19th-century science gradually refined the ideas that would fall upon the world like a thunderclap in "The Origin of Species." A New York Times Notable Book for 2002.