The Evolution of Charles Darwin

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The Evolution of Charles Darwin chronicles his development from a young, uncertain naturalist at the start of the Beagle’s now-legendary voyage to, five years later, the confident theorist who would establish the foundations of evolutionary biology.Darwin spent more time on land than at sea and, despite no prior youthful experience in the wild, nonetheless undertook a series of rough and dangerous expeditions with local guides hundreds of miles across deserts, down rivers, over mountains, constantly observing rock and land formations and wildlife and gathering specimens that would later contribute to his theories.The sea voyage itself was often dangerous, surviving raging tempests, an earthquake off the coast of Chile, discontent among the crew, the rescue of survivors of a previous expedition.Emma Darwin, Charles’s wife, is a very distant cousin of Diana Preston, leading to her initial interest in Darwin, his family, and his wider story.Preston has traveled to virtually every spot visited by Darwin and the Beagle, giving her descriptions added authenticity and vividness. The COVID-19 outbreak forced her to return home from the Atacama Desert in Chile in early 2020, to which she finally returned in January 2022, in addition to visiting the Galapagos and other locations.Diana Preston is an award-winning historian whose previous books range across multiple subjects. Several of her most successful have chronicled discovery, including A Pirate of Exquisite Mind, the life of legendary explorer and pirate William Dampier, and A First-Rate Tragedy, about Robert Falcon Scott and the race to reach the South Pole.Preston always receives superb reviews for her books in the Wall Street Journal,  New York Times Book Review, and others, for which she occasionally reviews herself, and has appeared on NPR and other radio. The Evolution of Charles Darwin will appeal readers of Hampton Sides’s bestseller In the Kingdom of Ice,  Andrea Wulf’s bestseller The Invention of Nature about the life of Alexander von Humboldt, and our own successful Barrow’s Boys by Fergus Fleming.Illustrated throughout with some 60+ archival drawings by Darwin and members of the Beagle’s crew, contemporaneous cartoons, portraits of Darwin and other luminaries who influenced him, and photographs taken by Preston over the course of her travels.Pegasus has just published Tom Chaffin’s Odyssey, also about the Beagle’s voyage. We’ll shortly provide a comparison between the books.