Customer Reviews

The Portable Darwin (Portable Library)

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This book is very good especially if you haven't read very much about Darwin and are not familiar with his works. The selections are good representations of his overall work and the editor's notes are helpful. An index would be nice.

Darwin was a voluminous, almost compulsive author. He preserved nearly all the unpublished notes, records, and manuscripts he ever scribbled. Beginning in 1839, a steady stream of published essays, monographs, and books flowed from his Kentish home, Down House. In addition, he wrote over 13,000 preserved letters.

Culling through all of this stuff to put together a Portable Darwin must've been a formidable task. So I mean no disrespect when I say that the editors of this volume could've selected more judiciously. Volumes in the Portable readers are intended, I presume, to introduce the general public to representative selections from designated authors. So in the Portable Darwin, editors Porter and Graham have done well to provide generous selections from the Beagle Journals, Origin, and Descent of Man.

But does the average reader really need to be familiar with Darwin's monographs on the effects of salt water on seeds or the formation of vegetable mold by worms? Wouldn't the reader new to Darwin have been better served, for example, by some of the fascinating selections from his letters in which he writes about his religious and moral beliefs? Granted, we have a taste or two of those thoughts buried in the larger selections offered in the Portable, and one short letter on the morality of vivisection. But in relation to all the other selections--including (yawn) studies of coral reef formations--its all too little.

Finally, in a volume of this kind, an index really is indispensible.