It is an exploration more than a settlement. Adam Gopnik calls his thoughts about Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln a "short book." His aim is not to erect one more edifice upon such grandly built properties but to travel around them, reflecting.

His travel voucher, so to speak, is a proposition: that two great figures, seemingly so different in their achievements, backgrounds and characters, can be linked in the transforming effect each had on their times and times to follow.

Gopnik extends the links to all manner of things: modest demeanors for evolving unshakable purposes, immense ideas argued engagingly from homely particulars, strong family ties, devastating family tragedies. Beyond these, he sees a larger tragedy at the root of their transforming work: universal death as the necessary agent of natural selection; vast death as the agent of emancipation. ... (Read the full review)