Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life

Over my years in management consulting and many more years listening to the growing insanity of politics, I have become increasingly anti-WORD. Whether listening to a consultant speak about "leveraging synergies to maximize shareholder value across multiple touch-points" while laying off an army or a politician wax eloquent about the need to let our nation fail simply to ensure that the other side not be right, I've lost my faith in talk. On the grand scale, words are meaningless. In this book, Adam Gopnik (with the able assistance of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin) restores my faith in what we *say*. His book is about two men who defined themselves and their era -- and whom we continue to define -- through many of the most breathtaking words ever written or spoken. Mr. Gopnik's verbal clarity, intellectual rigor, and historical synthesis are themselves extraordinary. This is a book you can read in an evening, think about for a week, and remember for years. You read it and you feel yourself planted in the sweep of history and in the sobering reality of the present. This book is a revelation.

These days the air is thick with talk of Abraham Lincoln. From the fascination with his "team of rivals" to the political roots in Springfield, Illinois, he shares with our new president, it seems everyone wants to grab a seat in Lincoln's rail car. Charles Darwin has had his own recent stint in the limelight. In 2005, in my hometown of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a conservative Republican federal judge patiently listened to seven weeks of testimony in a challenge to a small town school board's attempt to mandate the teaching of "intelligent design" --- a fundamentalist antidote to Darwin's theory of natural selection --- before issuing a blistering opinion rejecting it as a violation of the First Amendment. Born on the same day --- February 12, 1809 --- one in a cramped Kentucky log cabin and the other in comfortable circumstances in England, the subjects of The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik's intellectually stimulating appreciation might appear to be an odd couple. But like a contemporary Plutarch, Gopnik has linked these monumental historical figures on the intriguing theory that they form "two pillars of the society we live in: one representing liberal democracy, the other the human sciences...." And while that connection is far from obvious, by the end of a work in which he marries analytical rigor to his customary elegant prose, he has made a persuasive case that the two merit this unique joint recognition. Originally published as two pieces in The New Yorker, ANGELS AND AGES consists of four chapters alternating between Lincoln and Darwin, bracketed by opening and concluding essays in which Gopnik considers his subjects together. The book takes its title from the debate that has raged over the words uttered by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton at the moment of Lincoln's passing: Did the assassinated president belong to the "angels" or the "ages?" For Gopnik, that mystery triggers a searching inquiry into the influence of his subjects on the birth of modern liberal thought, as Western civilization, spurred by their work, underwent a decisive shift from a vertical worldview, eyes cast heavenward in reliance upon the divine, to one that came to grips with mankind's place in the vast forward movement of history. Gopnik is most captivated by Lincoln and Darwin's skill as writers, their facility with the written word forming the core of his thesis that "literary eloquence is essential to liberal civilization; our heroes should be men and women possessed by the urgency of utterance, obsessed by the need to see for themselves and to speak for us all." To support it, he marshals an impressive body of evidence in a work that in the best sense seems intended, not to end a debate, but to spark one. In the case of Lincoln, "a great writer whose form was talking," Gopnik argues that the lawyer-turned-politician's "rhetorical genius lay in making cold calculation look like passionate idealism, in making closely reasoned argument ring with the sound of religio

It is rare for a book of about 200 pages to contain much insight, but Adam Gopnik has done so, and managed to do it with an elegance of wit and language that would do credit to either of his subjects. Angels and Ages is a dual biography of two men born on the same February day in 1809: Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. Although born in very different circumstance, one in comfort and the other in dire poverty, both became major world changers and shifters. Both were accomplished wordsmiths, able to frame complicated ideas in beautiful, clear language. Both were devoted family men who suffered the loss of beloved children and endured difficult relationships with their spouses. Most of all, both were revolutionaries, able in one case to enunciate a clear doctrine of liberty and equality through law and in the other to set forth a new vision of how life began and developed. There are many more parallels than these in the lives of Darwin and Lincoln, and Gopnik does an excellent job describing and summarizing them. He does so in language that is as beautiful as anything either of his subjects could produce. I especially appreciated his Bibliographical Note at the end, in which he encapsulates most of the recent scholarship on the two men. While by no means a complete biography of either Lincoln or Darwin, Angels and Ages does capture the most important essence of both men, and provides its readers with much to ponder.

I must confess that I am apparently much more conversant with Darwin than with Lincoln. I found this book very interesting once I got into it, even though I read the chapters out of sequence (reading Darwin's two chapters first, then the second Lincoln chapter, then the first Lincoln chapter, and finally the intro and concluding chapter). The book is a celebration of these two giants on their joint bicentennial. While the author's focus shifts around frequently, the key idea he discusses in how Lincoln and Darwin communicated, and how their skill in using language contributed to their significance. For Lincoln, I came to understand, this is a hot topic currently, with a number of books devoted to his Cooper Union, Second Inaugural, Gettysburg speeches and addresses. For the author, the key to Lincoln is that the law allowed him to join the middle class and ultimately become President. He speaks in coldly rational, carefully constructed legal arguments, emphasizing contractual obligations and adhering to procedural requirements. For Lincoln, the curse of American life was violence--the cure was law. He spoke like the King James bible, and developed a technique for unleashing a final short, dramatic concluding sentence which put his argument into irrefutable perspective. Incidentally, the title of the book comes from a debate as to whether at Lincoln's deathbed, Secretary Stanton said that Lincoln now belonged to the "angels" or to the "ages." The second chapter devoted to Lincoln, "Lincoln in History," concentrates on this issue and related topics. As to Darwin, the author's analysis is superb. The key to the "Origin" is that anyone could (and most people did) read it. He was a Victorian scientist but wrote like a Victorian novelist, the author observes. Darwin is pictured as sort of a Victorian Lt. Columbo, piling fact upon fact, making the reader confortable, and then unleashing his ultimate point in straightforward language. He anticipates attacks on his position and sympathetically but firmly addresses them as he goes along--not as a "know it all" but rather based on years of minute observation of nature. For Darwin, slow and steady wins the race, and covers long stretches of time. I found particularly interesting the author's discussion of how the death of Darwin's daughter might have impacted on his theoretical development. Equally interesting is the author's firm (and quite correct) assertion that Darwin was no racist, a topic that sometimes pops up in current discussions of evolution. Finally, the author suggests we read Darwin's last book on earth worms to really grasp the essence of his writing skills. The two Darwin chapters offer some remarkable insights into this most remarkable character. The final chapter is primarily the author's ruminations and reflections on his subjects' use of legal and scientific reasoning; democracy and military power; does evolution undermine humanities?; the concept of progress; and how biology

This interesting, scholarly book looks at the parallel lives of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, both born on the same February day in 1809. It's a fascinating glimpse at what life was like for these two men, and how they both changed history. After their deaths, a new liberal voice emerges: "the change from soul to mind as the engine of existence, and then from angels to ages as the overseers of life." What makes Angels and Ages so compelling, for me, is the way these two men are made human. I now can see the flesh-and-blood husbands, fathers, sons and working men behind the icons. A portrait of Lincoln as a shrewd, clear-eyed politician emerges. Famously born in a Kentucky log cabin, Lincoln wrote that his father Thomas wrote his own name "bunglingly." After his marriage to Mary Todd, Lincoln stands on his front porch, "a tall man with enough money to build a big house and be proud of it." Spoiling his kids, Lincoln "held their hands as they danced him down the street." In Darwin, a timid doting father peeks out from these pages, a person who loved to look at things and wrestle with his kids. He delayed a full 21 years before publishing "his great idea, the idea of evolution by natural selection. He was afraid of being attacked by the powerful and the bigoted." Darwin was also haunted by the fact that his findings would "end any intellectually credible idea of divine creation," and his beloved wife Emma used religion for comfort after the death of their favorite child, 10-year-old Anna. Author Adam Gopnik is fond of using poetic turns of phrase and long sentences. For example, he writes this about reading Darwin's On the Origin of the Species: "It's a Victorian hallucinogen, where the whole world suddenly comes alive and begins moving, so that the likeness between seagulls and sandpipers on the beach where you are reading suddenly becomes spookily animated, part of a single restless whole, with the birds' giant lizard ancestors looming like ghosts above them." It's evocative, but you might need to slow down your reading to catch all his meaning. Here's the chapter list: Introduction: Angels and Ages 1. Lincoln's Mind 2. Darwin's Eye 3. Lincoln in History 4. Darwin in Time Conclusion: Ages and Angels