Darwin's Love of Life

A Singular Case of Biophilia

Darwin's Love of Life
Karen L Harel
RRP:
NZ$ 49.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 41.24
Hardback
h216 x 140mm - 192pg
25 Oct 2022 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780231208086
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Biophilia-the love of life-encompasses the drive to survive, a sense of kinship with all life-forms, and an instinct for beauty. In this unconventional book, Kay Harel uses biophilia as a lens to explore Charles Darwin' s life and thought in deeply original ways. In a set of interrelated essays, she considers how the love of life enabled him to see otherwise unseen evolutionary truths. Harel traces the influence of biophilia on Darwin' s views of dogs, facts, thought, emotion, and beauty, informed by little-known material from his private notebooks. She argues that much of what Darwin described, envisioned, and felt was biophilia in action. Closing the book is a profile of Darwin' s marriage to Emma Wedgwood, his first cousin, a woman gifted in music and medicine who shared her husband' s love of life. Harel' s meditative, playful, and lyrical musings draw on the tools of varied disciplines-aesthetics, astronomy, biology, evolutionary theory, history of science, philosophy, psychiatry, and more-while remaining unbounded by any particular one. Taking unexpected paths to recast a figure we thought we knew, this book offers readers a different Darwin: a man full of love, joy, awe, humility, curiosity, and a zest for living.
A playful, erudite, and fresh take on the emotional and imaginative dimensions of Darwin' s work, probing the many connections between his family relationships and the spirit of wonder with which he observed relationships in the living world. -- Ruth Padel, author of Darwin: A Life in Poems This is a joyful book. Instead of dwelling on the role of competition and extinction in Darwin' s theory, as is so often done, Kay Harel emphasizes that love of life in all its varieties is crucial to Darwin' s thinking and practice. The result is a deeply sympathetic study. -- Gillian Beer, author of Darwin' s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction [A] mighty debut. Harel' s lyrical musings delight, and they make for an original approach to a familiar topic. The science- and literary-minded alike will relish this thoughtful collection. * Publishers Weekly * A wonderful holistic understanding of Charles Darwin' s life and his own evolution. Recommended for fans of biologist/writer E. O. Wilson. * Library Journal *
Kay Harel is a writer who holds MAs in science journalism from New York University and in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. She has published essays on Darwin as well as on figures such as William James, Edward Lear, and Wallace Stevens in Southwest Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and Sexuality and Culture.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780231208086
Published: 25 Oct 2022
Published In: United States
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Format: Hardback
Height: 216mm
Width: 140mm
Pages: 192

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