The middleweight champion [of the early twentieth century, Stanley Ketchel] was stunned by [Wilson] Mizner's recitation of the Langdon Smith classic that starts "When you were a tadpole and I was a fish, In the Palaeozoic time" and follows the romance of two lovers from one geological age to another, until they wind up in Delmonico's. Ketchel had a thousand questions about the tadpole and the fish, and Mizner, a pedagogue at heart, took immense pleasure in wedging the whole theory of evolution into the fighter's untutored head. Ketchel became silent and thoughtful. He declined an invitation to see the town that night with Mizner and [Willus] Britt. When they rolled in at 5 a.m., Ketchel was sitting up with his eyes glued on a bowl of goldfish. "That evolution is all the bunk!" he shouted angrily, "I've been watching those fish nine hours and they haven't changed a bit." Mizner had to talk fast; one thing Ketchel couldn't bear was to have anybody cross him. —Alva Johnston, The Legendary Mizners

Americans seemed to fascinate Picasso. Once, in Paris, he invited the Murphys to his apartment, on the Rue de la Boëtie, for an apéritif, and, after showing them through the place, in every room of which were pictures in various stages of completion, he led Gerald rather ceremoniously to an alcove that contained a tall cardboard box. "It was full of illustrations, photographs, engravings, and reproductions clipped from newspapers. All of them dealt with a single person—Abraham Lincoln. 'I've been collecting them since I was a child,' Picasso said, 'I have thousands, thousands!' He held up one of Brady's photographs of Lincoln, and said with great feeling, 'There is the real American elegance!' " —Calvin Tomkins, Living Well Is the Best Revenge

We are all pebbles dropped in the sea of history, where the splash strikes one way and the big tides run another, and though what we feel ... continue reading >

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)

Small books don't necessarily have small ambitions. When I saw the unassuming title of Adam Gopnik's "Angels and Ages," subtitled "A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life," I was doubtful. The book's aim is to humanize larger-than-life figures, just as the author has humanized Paris and New York in his work for the New Yorker. He succeeds in this big task with wit and finesse, and then some.

The case for comparison between the men is solid. Both were born on Feb. 12, 1809. They lived and worked at approximately the same time, albeit on different continents, and were aware of each other, though they never met. Both changed the way we live. Darwin changed our ideas about history, whereas Lincoln squelched slavery and steered us through a civil war. Both men also weathered losses, passionately described here. Darwin's chief loss was that of his precocious daughter Annie to tuberculosis. Lincoln's son Willie died very young as well. Gopnik suggests that these experiences strengthened both men. ... (Read the full review)

The Gist:
Much has been made in recent weeks of the shared birthday of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, two juggernauts not only of their own age, but of all the years since. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik explores their legacies in this book-length series of essays, focusing on their abilities as writers and thinkers of the highest caliber. As Gopnik writes, "Literary eloquence is essential to liberal civilization; our heroes should be men and women possessed by the urgency of utterance." With their adherence to logic and observation, and devotion to thoughtful expression, Lincoln and Darwin—in addition to everything else they accomplished—helped kickstart the engine of the modern age.

Highlight Reel:
1. On the origin of Lincoln's facility with words: "The frontier America of Lincoln's youth was first of all a rhetorical society, where the ability to speak in public, at length was central to social ambitions; giving a speech in 1838 in Illinois was the equivalent of putting on a play in 1598 in London, the thing you did into which everything else flowed. (We are, by turn—and a writer says it with sadness—essentially a society of images: a viral YouTube video, an advertising image, proliferates and sums up our desires; anyone who can't play the image game has a hard time playing any public game at all.)" ... (Read the full review)