ANGELS AND AGES A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life

For Adam Gopnik, Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln are essential to the creation of the modern age. By an accident of history, both were born on February 12, 1809. Gopnik reads his own short biographies of the two men in a pleasing voice loaded with passion and enthusiasm, which help the listener ignore the occasional oddities of stress and timing. Particularly touching is Gopnik's sensitive and insightful rendition of Lincoln's and Darwin's views on death as a necessary part of life (war and evolution, respectively). But how little comfort those views provided when each man tragically lost a child. Gopnik clearly distinguishes between his own narrative and primary sources of writings and letters, but his attempt at a British accent for Darwin's letters is ill advised—he doesn't really get it right at all. A.B. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine [Published: JUNE 2009]