Not So Simple Paul Simon

Homeward Bound:

The Life of Paul Simon

By Peter Ames Carlin

Henry Holt

 My trifecta of reading biographies over the past few months ended with this 2016 life of musical performer and songwriter Paul Simon.  While the Tom Stoppard bio had the participation of its subject, and the Mike Nichols the cooperation of his friends, author Peter Ames Carlin did not have those advantages here.  He never got to interview his subject, nor several other important figures, like Art Garfunkel (though I wonder if he may have secretly helped.)  But he includes numerous notes that catalogue his sources, most of them published.

 I’ve followed Simon’s career since “The Sounds of Silence,” including for awhile professionally.  But I didn’t know much about his early life—his youthful association with “Artie”—and especially his early  professional career(s), as a hustling pop songwriter, plugger and producer (including while still a college student) named Jerry Landis, transformed into a folk singer in small clubs in England. 

The love/hate, brotherly intimacy of Simon and Garfunkel over the years is an irresistible theme, beginning with an arresting image of the two of them in Paul’s bedroom working on their harmonies so intensely that while singing they studied the inside of each other’s mouths.  Their relationship now and again evoked unattractive aspects of their characters: Simon as a clueless bastard, and Garfunkel as a passive-aggressive manipulator.  But together they were among the most potent acts of their time, and this book reminds us of just how big they were as pop stars and a cultural force, from the early 60s well into the 70s. 

 Carlin is a pretty good storyteller, with flashes of eloquence.  His summaries of songs and his judgment on the music are puzzlingly inconsistent—sometimes revealing, sometimes obtuse.  Of course, some of that impression is influenced by my disagreement with the songs and albums he likes and doesn’t, as well as how he characterizes them.

 I can’t say how accurate his facts are, except for one minor error that touches upon personal knowledge.  In his post-S &G career, Simon didn’t perform live until just after his second album was released, Here Comes Rhymin’ Simon.  His first concert was in Boston, and Carlin quotes extensively from Jon Landau’s laudatory review.  However, Carlin writes that it appeared in the Boston Phoenix, which it did not.  I know this because at the time I was the Managing Editor/Arts for the Boston Phoenix, and edited the review we did publish, which was by music journalist Peter Herbst.  Jon Landau, who by that time was probably transitioning from Rolling Stone’s record review editor to its film critic, wrote on music for our Cambridge rival alternative weekly, the Real Paper.  (He later went on to become Bruce Springsteen's producer and manager.)

 Which leads to my one and only Paul Simon story. The day our review was published, I was beginning a vacation, and on my way to visit friends in the Twin Cities.  I was carrying our paper with me when my plane from Boston landed in Chicago, and I rushed across O’Hare Airport to get to my connecting flight.  Along the way I mused idily, what if I ran into Paul Simon?   Minutes later, I did.  He was chatting with a young woman in an airline uniform near a ticket counter.  I thrust my newspaper into his hands, with the news that a review of his first concert was inside.  Then I remembered.  I had attended the concert myself, and I was as dazzled as Jon Landau was.  But Peter Herbst wasn’t, quite.  His review was mixed.

 So I mumbled something about enjoying the concert, when the young woman started to take an interest, and Simon looked at me and said curtly, “don’t say another thing.”  Evidently she didn’t know who he was, and he was enjoying that—perhaps enjoying making time with her without relying on the superstar aura.  I backed out of there as gracefully as I could (not very) and ran for my flight.

 Carlin answers one petty question I had, regarding the sudden change in Simon’s hairline: transplant or appliance?  According to Carlin, appliance.  Perhaps Simon got advice on the subject from Mike Nichols, with whom he worked and befriended.  Nichols' use of S&G songs in The Graduate revived their career at that point.

Carlin writes enough about Paul Simon's relationship with his father to suggest its complexities. But I remain curious about Paul Simon’s relationship with his slightly older brother, also a musician and (according to Carlin) a better guitar player.  He’s mentioned a few times but there are no scenes with them together.  Did they ever play together?  If not, why not?  I believe I saw his brother once—at that Boston concert, where he was helping to set up.  He looked like Paul’s twin, except with facial hair.  I’ve looked for mention of him ever since, but it’s as if he didn’t exist.  

 Carlin is especially enthusiastic about Simon’s music since (and including) Graceland (he misses only one album so far, released since 2016.)  But his description of how most of these records were made makes me a little queasy.  Even given the way music works and the fact that no musical composition is wholly original, I’m not sure how I feel about the process of using music invented by others in the studio and putting your own copyright on it.  As much as I liked many of these songs (and those recorded in Jamaica for an earlier album), when I listen to Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints now, the clash between the music (and where it comes from) and the very urban Manhattan/US contemporary lyrics jars me.  Still, I’m curious now about those more recent records I haven’t heard.

 The album which precedes Graceland was Hearts & Bones, originally conceived as a S&G record, that did poorly commercially.  Carlin seems to agree with the general sentiment at the time, but I liked that album very much when it came out, particularly “Rene and Georgia Magritte…” and now it’s apparently considered one of Simon’s best.  (Then again I remain fond of the S&G album Bookends, which apparently even Simon feels is inferior. It’s thin maybe, but what’s there anchors that time for me.)

 Carlin also denigrates the S&G song “The Dangling Conversation,” and quotes Simon as agreeing that it’s kind of an undergraduate ditty.  Since I was an undergrad at the time—and my strongest memory of the song is hearing it played repeatedly on the campus coffee shop jukebox—I don’t find that disqualifying. It was a great undergraduate song.

 Carlin mentions the late, unlikely pairing of Simon with Bob Dylan in a series of concerts.  They were rivals in the early 60s, and Simon was not shy about criticizing Dylan then.  Simon probably has more in common with another legend he toured with in recent years: Sting.  They both broke up groups at their commercial height, and both used their solo careers to explore new areas of music and songwriting.

 Carlin provides texture to the known history, and a lot of food for thought.  But nothing anybody writes or doesn’t write, nor any flaws in Simon’s character, can dispute the worth of the work.  He’s written so many great songs—from “Sounds of Silence” through "Mother and Child Reunion," “Kodachrome,” “My Little Town” and the most famous ones, like “Bridge” and “The Boxer.”  Then there are lesser- known gems like “Duncan,” “Only Living Boy in New York” and so on.

 And then there are the transcendent ones, the songs so nearly perfect that they are unassailable.  “American Tune,” “Slip Sliding Away” and “Still Crazy After All These Years” are my choices in that category.  They are quintessentially Paul Simon songs, and also among the few songs that most still speak to me, and speak for me.

 Since this book was originally published, Robert Hillburn’s Paul Simon: The Life has appeared, which did have Simon’s full participation.  I haven’t read this yet, so it will be interesting to see how it differs. Paul Simon didn’t do many interviews, at least until recent years, but he was always articulate and precise. He was much more forthcoming about the process of writing his songs, and I’d love to see more of that in print. Carlin’s book may not be the definitive life of Paul Simon but it seems a professional and provocative start.

Two Giants of Our Times, Also Friends

Mike Nichols: A Life

By Mark Harris

Penguin Press

671 pages

 Tom Stoppard: A Life

By Hermione Lee

Knopf

872 pages

 These two books belong together not only because they are both extensive and well-written biographies published in the last year, and their subjects are major arts and entertainment figures of the past half century, but because these two men knew and very much liked each other, and featured in each other’s lives.

 They also started out in a similar—and similarly peculiar—way.  Both were eastern European emigrants at a young age, and remade their identities in a new country and a new language with new names, prompting a sense of doubleness or inauthenticity that haunted each of them.

 They both became globally famous, yet highly identified with their new countries. As they became financially as well as creatively successful, they each developed a lavish lifestyle, tailoring it to their particular tastes: Stoppard collected first editions, Nichols collected art and horses.  They were both inner-directed and perhaps shy, while both also cultivated a large and varied array of friends, and both became known for entertaining well and on a large scale.

 Both of these biographies extol this friendship. Both note the speech Stoppard made when Nichols received the ultimate accolade of the Kennedy Center Honors.  But only the Nichols biography mentions that, in a long mental fog from a reaction to prescription sleeping medication that led him to believe he was going broke, Nichols called Stoppard and asked if he could come and live with him.

 Yet they worked together only once, when Mike Nichols directed the first Broadway production of Stoppard’s play, The Real Thing in 1984, which began their friendship.  Though Stoppard sometimes wrote for the movies, he never worked on one that Nichols directed. The main aspects of their professional lives were very different.

Mike Nichols with playwright Neil Simon

 Nichols was famous in America, first from television and then as a director.  He was a powerful presence in Hollywood and New York theatre who was essential to the success of many others, beginning with Neil Simon and Whoopi Goldberg, and many young actors who became stars.  But Tom Stoppard is equally famous in England, and in the smaller theatrical world of London he also had furthered careers and maintained a web of relationships.  People were devoted to both of them. The style and subjects of Stoppard’s plays, which may seem arcane to Americans, nevertheless have won him international attention and acclaim.

 There was much about Nichols childhood I didn’t know, but I remember Nichols and May on our black and white TV set.  Still, I was surprised to realize that of Nichol’s 19 feature films, I saw all but three in theatres when they came out.  There is no other director I can say that about, nor is there ever likely to be another. Though I didn’t live in New York, I even saw two of the Broadway plays Nichols directed, including that original production of The Real Thing.

 I was in college when Nichols directed the quintessential 1960s movie, The Graduate. He’d already directed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in its way the classic movie about 1950s marriage and sexuality, and Carnal Knowledge, which took that sensibility into the 1970s.  He nailed the 80s with Working Girl, and the 90s with Angels in America (a miniseries for television that I first saw on DVD) as well as Postcards From the Edge, Primary Colors and The Birdcage.  One of his lesser-regarded films, Regarding Henry (with Harrison Ford) is one of my personal favorites.

 At the same time, the style and subjects are so varied, I’ve often forgotten which movies Nichols did direct. This biography notes that his genius was applying fundamentals by the core question he asked: what was this situation really like?  And his attention to the expectations of story: what happens next?

 I was in college as well when Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead exploded in London and then on Broadway.  We could feel the exciting rush of fresh air (not usual with explosives, as Stoppard might point out) breathing into our theatrical efforts on the Midwestern prairie.  I read it, as I did all of his plays thereafter. 

 Stoppard is rightly skeptical of how true to the play as performed the reading of it can be.  But most of his early plays required such large productions that they seldom got out of New York.  I eventually managed to see several regional theatre productions (notably of Arcadia, which he calls his “perfect” play, and which has the advantage of a small cast and single set and no special effects) and several university productions, good and indifferent.  Some of the plays became more coherent on stage, and some productions didn’t match my imagination.  Though I’ve seen some of his television plays and heard radio plays, basically, the playwright Stoppard has been on the page, as language. Even so, I’ve been an enthusiast.

Benedict Cumberbatch in "Parades End"

 I’ve been particularly delighted by some of Stoppard’s film work: from the Indiana Jones movie with Sean Connery to his Oscar-winner Shakespeare in Love, probably the most similar to his stage writing on film (apart from the film of “Rosencrantz…” he directed—his one play made into a movie so far.)  But I equally admire Parade’s End, his BBC TV miniseries adaptation of several novels by Ford Maddox Ford.  I’ve seen it, and by reading the books and then Stoppard’s screenplay, I’ve deepened my appreciation of his achievement (and his methods.)   

Stoppard brought wit and erudition back to playwriting. In his work and through his personality, he made intellectual respectability respectable as entertainment.  His sense of craft is also important and inspiring, and his idea that the writer's task is to regulate the flow of information to some end, is especially fruitful.

 So I’ve been aware of Nichols and Stoppard’s professional careers more or less all the way through.  (Nichols died in 2014 at age 83.  Stoppard keeps threatening to retire, but then comes up with another idea for a play.) Therefore these biographies contrast and compare with my experiences and memories of these years.  I know the references, I get the jokes.  But of course there was a lot I didn’t know, that I learned in context in these pages.  Marriages and affairs, children and friendships, muses and nemeses, all texture their lives.

 Stoppard gave many interviews over the years which I’ve read and watched.  He was intelligent and charming, as was Nichols in his interviews and discussions.  So I’d formed impressions of both men, which were augmented if not fundamentally changed by these biographies.  Perhaps Nichols was somewhat farther from his public persona, but my sense of him deepened.  These biographies detail how both of them were aware of these differences between their public persona or public perception, and the complexities of their private selves.  Both had persistent self-doubts.

 Given the circumstances of their early lives, a dogged sense of uncertainty would seem inevitable.  Hermione Lee in particular suggests how the theme of doubleness runs through Stoppard’s work.  He consciously applied it to his own life with his play Rock & Roll, which he said began as an exploration of what his life might have been like had he not left Czechoslovakia and ended up in England. 

As seems ironic but is frequently the case, both are immigrants who more thoroughly embrace and express characteristics of their country than many native-born.  Stoppard has lived the life of an English squire and man of letters of earlier ages, adapted to his times.  Mike Nichols lived the American dream of show business fame and glitter, and expressed much of what America was in his time.

But late in life both men looked to the past and to their roots, and found something else they had in common: while Nichols knew of his European Jewish relatives and ancestors, Stoppard learned of his only in recent decades.  Both lost relatives to the Holocaust, adding tragedy to their dislocation. 

 Both biographies—by Mark Harris and Hermione Lee—are judicious and admirably written, and a great pleasure to read.  Lee has the additional critical job of elucidating plays that many readers probably haven’t seen, which she does gracefully and convincingly. 

 Books are internal negotiations; perhaps biographies more than others.  It’s a difficult form, requiring a lot of research and then a lot of construction.  Harris and Lee have selected and shaped, but without reducing their subjects to formulas.  They sprawl appropriately, making for rich reading.  

Gift Books 2010: Biography

Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life

by Nicholas Phillipson

Yale Press

It would be difficult to find a figure who needs rescue from a mythology built on self-serving propaganda more than does Adam Smith. Next to Darwin, Smith's actual thoughts have been the most kidnapped and distorted (often enough by the same folks.) Though the usual documents that feed biography are scarce, Nicholas Phillipson locates Smith in the historical context of the Scottish Enlightenment. Perhaps most importantly, he gives us the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments as well as The Wealth of Nations. By reconciling these and placing them in an even larger context of Smith's thought, Phillipson provides some guidance for the invisible hand. There's also enough personal information for the reader of biography. I could do no better summarizing the content than James Pressley does, but I can add that it's an attractive and well-made book, suitable for gift-giving.

Nelson Mandela: Conversations with Myself

by Nelson Mandela; Foreword by President Barack Obama

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

In letters, journal entries and manuscripts as well as excerpts of conversation from his 27 years of imprisonment and afterwards when he was President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela reveals a personal as well as political and moral chronicle. There are a lot of mundane matters discussed in a mundane manner, suddenly followed by something important, revealing and even surprising. It's not a narrative, but a portrait by means of fragments. The process of his thoughts, the personal and political tactics that changed him and his country are revealed slowly, in concrete moments. It's a unique view of a great man of our time, not for everyone perhaps, but a fine gift for the right person.

Holiday Gift Books 2010
Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt
by Robert Gottlieb
Yale

This is the first in a Yale series on Jewish Lives. It's the first new biography in English of Sarah Bernhardt in awhile apparently, and the author is the former editor in chief of several publishing houses as well as the New Yorker. He currently writes for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, where a detailed appreciation of this and other books on Bernhardt can be found.

Gottlieb reputedly casts a skeptical eye on some of the more outrageous stories Bernhardt told about herself, though this book records a lot of highs and lows--and excesses. My own interest was learning about her as an actress, but that's not this book apparently. Personally I wasn't drawn to her as a character, and I couldn't get beyond the writing, which is too florid for me. It is however a well-published book: handsome to the eye and to the hand, with sharp illustrations integrated throughout the text. So if there are people on your holiday shopping list who are interested in the Divine Sarah, this is an appropriate gift book.

Holiday Gift Books 2010
White House Diary
by Jimmy Carter
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

A couple of the reviews of this book I've seen call it an example of why Jimmy Carter's presidency failed. I don't read it that way. As a book it's a fascinating glimpse into the day by day of a presidency. It doesn't provide an overall narrative, although Carter's Afterword tries to add some context. Instead it gives us some idea of the daily reality. Given that this was a significantly smaller country (in population) in the 1970s, this book probably only hints at the complexity of the presidential calendar.

Carter was a relative novice in Washington, but even so, some of what he learned is probably new in its extent to every President. He is surprised by the sloppy journalism of the national press, and he finds as Presidents before and after him did, that the military establishment can out and out ignore the President and try to out wait him. The diary does counter some impressions of his presidency overall--he was pretty popular at the beginning, more so than Clinton would be. And for all his attention to detail, he made some big initiatives right away, particularly in the Middle East.

He's been criticized for recording his fishing catches, or for scenes like getting down on the floor to help pianist Vladimir Horowitz spread carpets to dampen the sound for his concert that evening. But to me these are welcome examples of some balance in the White House, some break from weighty matters that is necessary for a President to stay sane. I doubt many general readers will want to read every word of every entry, but this book is surprisingly serviceable for casual reading.

Holiday Gift Books 2010
Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation
by Daisy Hay
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Last year, Romantically inclined readers had The Age of Wonders (Richard Holmes, Pantheon) and The Atmosphere of Heaven (Mike Jay, Yale) that drew connections between science and literature in the lives of several generations of early and mid-19th writers and scientists. This book by Daisy Hay concentrates on the relationships within the younger Romantics--particularly the Shelleys and Lord Byron--and includes some fascinating but often forgotten figures, such as Thomas Love Peacock and the editor and writer that brought many of these young English idealists together, Leigh Hunt.

Hay especially gives the women their due, including the wives and sisters who at times came out of the troubled shadows of the men. But her account of Mary Shelley's literary career sets some proportions aright, as Mary was more famous than Percy B. during his lifetime, owing to the popularity of Frankenstein. Much has been made of the literary revelations concerning Mary's sister Claire, and her relationship with the Shelleys and Lord Byron (by whom she had a daughter), thanks in large part to Hay's discovery of Claire's long-lost unpublished short memoir. I suppose this may have rocked the literary world, but what comes across in reading this book is Daisy Hay's careful fair-mindedness. She doesn't sensationalize anything, and not only provides different perspectives but evaluates them sensibly.

Her point of view on what makes the Romantic approach to literature different is striking. It was in many respects "an avowedly democratic project, since it suggested that anyone could be a poet, as long as he or she understood that poetic inspiration was present in the sights and relationships of ordinary life..." But her key point is that while the image of these poets--Shelley, Keats and Byron--is of the solitary soul, in fact for all of them (though Shelley in particular), their lives would "move between solitude and sociability, for the two opposing states to be suspended in productively balanced tension."

This book itself expresses a productively balanced tension, between judicious information and an absorbing narrative. Let me put it this way: I read most literary biographies in small chunks--a few pages, a chapter at a time--and am content to do so. But I got to a point in this book that I had to keep reading, absorbed in the story. I had to finish it.

If you're looking for a gift book for someone fascinated by this period and these figures, this is a very good bet.

Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World
by Claire Harman
Holt 277 pages

Viewers of PBS may be forgiven if from time to time they conclude that they’ve stumbled on the Jane Austen Channel. In recent years PBS/BBC have filmed five of her novels and a new biography, following the international success of the Pride and Prejudice miniseries of 1995, which author Claire Harman credits as the beginning of the current wave of “Austenolatry,” or Jane-mania.

New movies and books are just the start: there are Austen festivals, web sites, board games, fashions and yes, Darcy and Elizabeth action figures. A virtual industry in the UK, Austen is an international icon. She has the fame of the single name: absent Tarzan, she is our only Jane.

Not bad for a writer with (it’s said) a single plot: Boy Meets Girl, Girl Gets Boy. But as Harman chronicles it, Jane wasn’t always famous. For years after her obscure life and quiet death in 1817 she was virtually unknown, except by other novelists plundering her plots and stealing her characters. Even her centennial was modestly marked, in contrast to the popular acclaim accorded to the more florid novels of the Bronte sisters (Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre.)

But eventually the ironic yet romantic grace of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, etc. became more powerful, first with the English elite and then more broadly. In World War I “Austen was prime among the texts that went to war, and the trenches were full of Janeites.” By World War II, the inspiration and comfort of the English identity she expressed was more consciously employed when Pride and Prejudice first reached the screen in 1940, starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson.

Interest in Austen herself fueled Jane-mania, and Harman describes the many attempts to deal with—and to pointedly embroider--her sparse biography. It’s worth noting that, at least until feminist critiques and gender-based marketing, Austen’s wonderful sentences were as openly admired by men as by women.

Harman’s book is accessible but scholarly. She starts with the strong momentum of Austen’s life and Jane’s satirical bent, but that ends abruptly with her death after 60 pages. The subsequent literary history and Harman's pointed observations can be interesting, but I admit I was waiting for more than she offered about the films. So let me suggest that the best brief film about Austen and her work is on the DVD of The Jane Austen Book Club, which is itself the most subtle and satisfying of the recent Austen-based movies.

As for the screen versions of Austen's novels, they continue to be points of entry to the books for many people. They were for this literature major: it was seeing that 1940 Pride & Prejudice on TV that started me reading all of Austen in quick succession. But I also admire the Keira Knightley feature as well as the PBS miniseries. In fact, I find that most of the screen versions I've seen have their own particular virtues, but in the end their best elements are Austen’s sentences, even as occasional dialogue. Austen’s stories are clearly mythic for our time, but those sentences are why she truly is Divine Jane.

The Atmosphere of Heaven is one of a trio of related books that combine biography and cultural history to be considered for gifts this year, described in the post below.

Gerald Martin's substantial biography of a singular writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, reviewed below.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life
by Gerald Martin
Knopf 642 pages

When One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in the U.S.—especially when it appeared in paperback in the early 1970s—it arrived as a revelation. As books editor for a weekly newspaper in Boston I met writers and editors who came up from New York, and the talk was always of this sudden magician, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. No novel astonished the literati as profoundly, but that was not its most impressive accomplishment. When anyone asked me to recommend a book they might enjoy, this one was the easiest answer for years, and it didn’t matter if the reader was a Cambridge post-grad or a waitress in western Pennsylvania, they were all blown away.

As chronicled in this first substantive biography of Marquez, it was the same everywhere. Praised first by writers and critics across the Spanish-speaking world, it outsold previous record-holders by a factor of ten. When it was translated into Japanese, a prominent novelist in Japan was so overwhelmed that he stopped writing.

One Hundred Years... is the natural center of this biography, coloring everything leading up to it. Though Marquez himself wrote about his early life and years as a journalist in a wonderful memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, Gerald Martin finds more to reveal, and does so with prose that sometimes soars into Marquez territory. He details more connections between the life and this most famous novel than were previously known.

Marquez had a compelling story anyway: poor and abandoned by his mother, raised by his grandparents in a remote Columbia town, he struggled as a journalist and a writer of obscure fiction and not very good movies. Martin notes the European and American influences—Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway—of the writer who would personify new Latin American literature. The local popular music (which he sang in cafes) influenced him, as well as Bartok and the Beatles (the album “A Hard Day’s Night” played as he wrote.) His “magical realism” also came from his grandmother’s stories.

Yet One Hundred Years of Solitude was just the beginning. Next he published a literary tour de force, Autumn of the Patriarch, with chapters of a single long paragraph and even of a single gargantuan sentence. It is at once a tribute to his modernist models and an exploration of Latin American history. Some literary experts consider it his best work.

But he didn’t abandon the other half of his astounding success: ordinary readers. Novels that followed that, like Love in the Time of Cholera, were his most popular. His Chronicle of A Death Foretold, Martin writes, printed more copies “than for any other first edition of any literary work ever published in the world.”

Martin writes well and perceptively about the different locales of his life, and how deeply Garcia Marquez felt connected to his home area, which was a cultural but also a class grounding. He follows the important relationships, providing vivid descriptions of the characters in the author’s life.

Martin notes his political notions and actions, his fascination with power, and his controversial relationship with Fidel Castro. His point of view on these matters and the time he spends on them was less of a problem for me than the falling off of focus in the last third of this book, and Martin’s increasingly querulous tone. Still, it’s a fascinating account of a singular life, and an admirable accomplishment. Insofar as Garcia Marquez is a hero—and in many respects he is, to me as well as others—this can also be considered an heroic work.

A fascinating book on the evolution of Charles Darwin, reviewed below.

The Young Charles Darwin
By Keith Thompson
270 pages Yale University Press

In the 200th anniversary year of his birth, and 150 years after his book on the origin of species, Charles Darwin remains the most controversial and in many ways influential scientist of the 21st century, as he was of the 20th and 19th.

Darwin and his theories are written about endlessly, but this book actually covers new ground: his youth, education and early career. Just a glance at the cover—not the inscrutable bearded face of textbooks and postage stamps, but a slim, young and handsome visage—suggests how foreign this territory is. Here are the foundations of his evolutionary theories, including his fabled five-year voyage around the world aboard the Beagle. But most telling, here is the person who is becoming Charles Darwin.

Keith Thomson is an assiduous scholar and an absorbing writer, so this book is a fascinating read. He won me immediately by noting that since the Darwin men had a limited number of first names (“Charles” and “Erasmus” mostly), they were known in the family by nicknames. So Charles Robert Darwin, the fearsome intellect and alarming revolutionary, was called Bobby.

Bobby’s career was hardly a straight line to evolution, even though his famous grandfather (Erasmus Darwin) proposed the basic idea. He studied first to be a doctor, then a clergyman. He was an amateur naturalist who acquired his first fame in geology, which was the first field to offer evidence of change over vast lengths of time, beyond the current Biblical interpretations.

He also fudged a lot of his early life in his own autobiography, and was notoriously lax in giving others due credit—even though one of his first discoveries was stolen by a friend and mentor. Despite his independent income, he worried about his career.

In the process of telling young Darwin's story, Thomson also provides a captivating guide to a unique time, when sciences like geology and the life sciences were really just getting started, and enthusiastic amateurs made real contributions (for much of Darwin’s life, there was no such word as “scientist.”)

This book solves the so-called mystery of why there was so much time between Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle and publication of his theory: it took that long to work it all out. Proposing a mechanism for what was supposed to be the work of the Creator required mental adjustments as well as much supporting evidence as possible.

Those theories remain essential to a lot of science and how we see the world, yet interpretations of them are still changing. "Darwin had the luck," said George Bernard Shaw, "to please anybody with an axe to grind." But now with this enlightening book there is a new account of Darwin’s own evolution.