Rating: 
Summary: A well researched and illustrative account of Darwin.
Review: This is a well researched biographical account of Darwin, his family and the struggle he had with the death of his ten-year old beloved daughter. Her death haunted him until he himself died. The author did an excellent job of illustrating Darwin's character and his thought processes while developing his theory of species evolution through natural selection. Mr. Keynes certainly deserves five stars for his effort.However, the attempt to tell the story of Darwin using his daughter and her death as a focal point doesn't work very well. It is almost a distraction in the first half of the book. Certainly her death was important and influenced Darwin's thinking, but her story may have been more properly placed peripherally, focusing more on Darwin himself, as was done later in the book. Dana Sobel was able to use the letters of Gaileo's daughter much more effectively in her book, "Galileo's Daughter". This is not a reflection of Mr. keyne's effort, but rather the fact that Ms. Soble had much more material to work with. There are 124 surviving letters of Galileo's daughter and she lived until age 34. Once the book moved beyond the death of Darwin's daughter, it became more informative since Charles Darwin was now the centration point and his story became more illuminating. Of particular interest is the attention given to the recurrent mention of God and religion. Mr. Darwin had to reconcile his evolving (excuse the pun) view of God with the prevailing religiousness of society and his wife's deep Christian belief. He managed it quite well and he was strategic in his approach to publishing his ideas. While he developed his species theory in 1938, it wasn't until 1859 that he published "Origin of The Species" and even then, he only briefly mentioned human origins in the book's conclusion. He finally addressed man's origin in 1871 when he published "The Descent of Man". His handling of the religious question was often brilliant. Once when questioned if his species theory was compatible with a belief in God he answered "It has always appeared to me to be more satisfactory to look at the immense amount of pain and suffering in this world as the inevitable result of the natural sequence of events, i.e. general laws, rather than from the direct intervention of God." He also said at one point that "the safest conclusion seems to me that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect, but man can do his duty." Even late in life Darwin recognized that "the human brain was not a perfect instrument for finding essential truths." Still, regarding his his own religous classification "he preferred the word agnostic" rather than atheistic. And finally, Mr. Keynes advises that Darwin felt that "While there was work to be done on Earth and humanity, while nature still held so many of her secrets, the effort devoted to aims other than natural could be put to better use." In summary, the book gets off to a slow start, initially weighed down with an excess of trivial details, but eventually takes off and gives us great insight into one of science's most influential figures.
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