Book Review: Angels and Ages
New Statesman
Aug 24, 2009
Angels and Ages: a Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life, Adam Gopnik Quercus,224pp, £16.99
These essays emerged from the slightest of beginnings: Gopnik, a New Yorker contributor, noticed that Abraham Lincoln, the emancipator of slaves, and Charles Darwin, the liberator of secular man, were both born on 12 February 1809. Startingfrom this spare fact, Gopnikuses his mirroring of the lives of the politician and the botanist to explain how these two great communicators "helped to make our moral modernity", and to divulge the emotional reality at the heart of their endeavours.
Both men were haunted by death. Darwin's belief in a divinity wavered in the face of his scientific findings, while Lincoln saw the old order come to a cataclysmic end in the bloodshed of the American Civil War. Both had buried a child. Gopnik sure-footedly explores how, the old certainties gone, each came to believe that "We can't look up to know how to act. But we can't look back, either." Thus they were compelled forward towards a world bounded by science and democracy, dragging the rest of us in their wake.
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