Customer Reviews

Huxley: From Devil's Disciple To Evolution's High Priest (Helix Books)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've never read a book quite like Desmond's. He is an extremely talented writer and is obviously enthusiastic about Huxley, his "X club" cohorts, and Victorian England in general. Some of his prose is worth savoring, in fact. However, as other reviewers have mentioned, his talent and enthusiasm primarily result in a 650 page-long monograph of purple prose. It is difficult to find a single sentence on some pages that doesn't contain a simile (usually of an overwrought nature) or highly charged authorial proclamation. Although this practice certainly makes the writing lively, it also makes it extremely heavy-going and, at times, quite confusing. It is difficult to read more than a few pages at a time.

As for the book's material, it is never less than fascinating. Desmond is a thorough researcher, and he never fails to explore the major events in Huxley's life in proper detail. He is also enormously well-schooled in the world of Victorian science, university politics, and culture. Although he makes even the slightest struggle in Huxley's life seem like a battle for all time, he also succeeds in making "Hal" a truly sympathetic and utterly unparalleled individual. I had no problem with the straight narrative structure as other reviewers seem to have had, but many, many names popped in and out of the story with little information to refresh my memory and this grew tiresome.

In short, I recommend giving this book a shot. You may tolerate or even enjoy Desmond's prose. There is a lot of wonderful information about a wonderful and remarkable man to be imbibed. However, be warned that it will most likely be a murky, if hot and spicy, pool to wade through.

I've read Adrian Desmond's Huxley biography several times since its initial publication a decade ago. When I first read it, I thought it was a tour de force; ten years later, it still holds up.

Desmond is a brilliant biographer: his "Darwin" (co-authored with James Moore) and his studies of Robert Owen have been deeply influential among historians of science. The difference between those books and this one, though, is that Desmond obviously likes Huxley: he admires the young Huxley's drive and ambition; his willingness to take risks; his ferocious, furious determination to succeed in despite lack of connections or inheritance (Victorian Britain wasn't so far from Jane Austen when Huxley was striking out on his own); and his incredible success. As much as any single individual, Huxley deserves credit for creating our modern notion of what science can do, and how scientists should be treated-- by the state, by the general public, by universities. It's the bulldog's world; we just live in it.

The hip-hop criticism is astute. The book is actually filled with references to earlier histories of science: nearly every page has a play on the title of some book or article. Insiders will get them; apparently they're noticeable, but distracting, to others.

Still, the book is a model for how to write biography, and probably the best introduction to Victorian science and culture around today.

What a fine book and bio! The author stated that he is most interested in placing TH Huxley into the context of his times, late 19th Century England, and the world, and he succeeds completely! From THH's humble origins with descriptions of the slums of 1840's London, through the amazing Rattlesnake voyage to Australia and New Guinea, and onward to the world's #1 Iconoclast (Nietzsche came a little later), this book reads like the best novel, with tons of biology, paleontology,history of science, theological debunking, and English history all included. Not to mention the sometimes difficult financial and family life of the founder of the famous 20th century Huxleys. THH was obvious as close to a universal scientific genius and spokeman as we'll ever have! Very strange how his many claims for science in school were accepted in Britain by the 1890's, but are still controversial in 2000's USA!

Thomas Huxley deserves better than this meandering, plodding tome. What should have been a facinating biography is lost in the obtuse style the author uses. On the plus side--there are some very good passages and pockets of wonderful information, and the bibliography is amazingly complete. On the minus side--the shining bits are so deeply hidden in the depths of the authors quagmire style you may need a machete to find them. I also agree with some earlier posts that a thematic approach would be preferrable to a strictly chronological narrative.

I have been very much impressed by Thomas Huxley and wanted to know more about him, his life and his works. Desmond's book provided me with all this information and much more. I tend to agree though with some comments made by earlier reviewers. The book could have been written in an easier format and style. This could have probably been achieved by separating his personal and family life in the first two or three chapters devoting the rest of the book to his scientific and professional work. Be that as it may, the book is a mine of useful information. Huxley was a great scientist and a great thinker. His capacity to think clearly and logically is evidenced by his defining "agnosticism" as a way of thinking which is different from blind religious faith and outright atheism. Since we can not scientifically prove (yet) that some kind of God does not exist, it will be wrong to believe that God does not exist. Likewise, there does not exist any rational ground to believe that God does exist. Majority of human beings are in the grip of different religions which demand blind faith in the existence of God. And this faith leads humanity into a bundle of rigmaroles which religion forbids to question. Huxley and several others before him have published works to rid the human race from the terrible things that different religions demand of their followers to believe and practice. Huxley helped elevating science and rational thought to a station that they deserve. Even though the book is not easy to read, it is full of valuable information.

Mohammad Gill

Rarely have I encountered such an awkward and opaque writing style. Desmond uses the sampling techniques of hip-hop, producing sentences by stringing together various quotes and quote fragments. The result manifests neither rhythm nor flow as the reader must laboriously decode even the shortest sentences. The overall result is that the book which although it has fair to good factual and analytical content has a fragmentary feel about it and is in general a chore to read.

It is many years since I read this, but having read the other review, I just want to note that at the time I thought it the best science-history book I had read for many years - since the author's Hot Blooded Dinosaurs, in fact. Some might find it a bit heavy going, especially the dissection of many aquatic creatures, but it is worth persevering.

While this is an extremely thorough and complete review of Huxley's life and work, I found several problems with the book. In brief, these include: A Hemingwayesque type of writing (short declaratory sentences) without H's style to pull it off. An overuse of adjectives by about a factor of three. Many sentences that, in spite of being short, were hard to disentangle grammatically. My most serious criticism of the content, though, is that the author stuck much too closely to a time-line rather than an idea or subject line. For example, he makes the statement, in several places, that finally Huxley saw the light and fully bought into evolution and natural selection as presented by Darwin. But he never seems to explain this: why the hesitancy and why the "sudden" conversion. There is too much mixing up of private life with scientific ideas. And no real counter is given to Huxley's antipathy to Owen whose work seems to be at least as long-lived as Huxley's (dinosaurs?). For my taste, a much more satisfying way of writing scientific biography can be found by reading Janet Browne's first vol. of a bio. of Darwin ("Coasting").

The book was quite thrilling. I bought it as a birthday present for my wife (who is a Huxley fan), dipped into it and was hooked. It made me go straight to some of Huxley's essays which I had bought in a second hand bookshop and which but for Desmond would be gathering dust on my bookshelves. Huxley's prose style is tremendous. Desmond's biography of Darwin (which I am reading at the moment) is also very good. Anyone with the slightest interest in the history of ideas should read both these books.

This is one of the best bios of Huxley ever written (cf. also the more theoretical work of Shellie Lyons) and seems a natural companion to Moore & Desmond's work, Darwin: The Tormented Evolutionist.
The new style of Darwin studies takes the legacy of such as John Greene and others and zeroes in on the social context of the emergence of the theory as ideologically charged.
In Huxley's case one sees the generational change breaking the Anglican monopoly of the Paley-ites, but in the process creating a new establishment in the conservative revolution of Darwin's theory.
What is remarkable is that Darwin's bulldog had an initial clarity that drove him to defend Darwin on evolution, but demur on natural selection. How ironic. Le plus ca change!
It is hard to impossible to take theories of evolution in complete seriousness as pure science when we see the almost outrageous social darwinist cast to the whole operation. Huxley, to his credit, saw things differently toward the end in his final classic Evolution and Ethics. Would that the generations springing from his first great defense of the theory could come to his final regrets. Nice work.