2009 National Book Award Finalist, on Darwins' Leap of Faith
Trent Gilliss, online editor
The finalists for this year’s National Book Awards have been announced. One of the books that intrigues me (yes, I’m a daddy with two boys) is Deborah Heiligman’s young people’s book titled Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith.
Reading Darwin’s transmutation notebooks and correspondence with family and colleagues — as well as Krista’s fascinating interview with James Moore — helped me gain a greater appreciation for the complexity of the man, the influential role of the religious and a-religious leanings of his wife and father’s side, and the death of his daughter at such a young age.
From the National Book Foundation’s site:
“Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, his revolutionary treatise on evolution, in 1859. Even today, the theory of evolution creates tension between the scientific and religious communities. This same debate raged within Darwin himself and played an important part in his marriage: Emma’s faith gave Charles a lot to think about as he on his controversial theory.
This biography of Charles Darwin takes a personal look at the man behind evolutionary theory. His children doubled as scientific specimens, and his wife’s religious convictions made him rethink how the world would receive his ideas. What emerges is a portrait of a brilliant man, a radical science, and a great love.”
If anybody has read this book and has thoughts they’d like to share, I’d enjoy hearing more.
"The Bonfire of China’s Vanities"
Shiraz Janjua, Associate Producer
Our guest from this week’s The Buddha in the World program, Pankaj Mishra, wrote an interesting piece in the New York Times about the literary scene in China, specifically focusing on the work of Yu Hua and his novel Brothers. Not specifically related to what he was talking about in the program, but worth a read nonetheless. His skeptical take on the Asian dance with Western modernity continues.
When I first met Yu one evening in Shanghai in 2006, he confidently described to me his vision of “Brothers” as a social and moral critique of China’s evolution. Yet he was suffering from a version of postpublication angst common among authors — the cankerous feeling that his work, and its vision of China lurching between political authoritarianism, extreme poverty, consumerist excess and moral depravity, was not being taken seriously enough. High sales and popular acclaim had not taken the sting out of the venomous reviews. But almost three years of a sustained critical assault on “Brothers” seems to have hardened Yu. He now sees the attacks in sociological rather than literary terms, as exposing a fault line between generations, and his detractors as typical of China’s new nationalists — people too young to have any memory of their country’s previous traumas but obsessed with boosting China’s image as a rising power vis-à-vis the West.
The Movie Montage That Didn’t Make the Cut
by Rob McGinley Myers, associate producer
In the original interview for this week’s program “Getting Revenge and Forgiveness,” our guest Michael McCullough mentioned the fact that human beings have been telling revenge stories for millennia. In a Greek tragedy like Medea, the main character kills her own children in revenge for her husband’s unfaithfulness. In Shakespeare, the ghost of Hamlet’s father tells him, “If thou didst ever thy dear father love— / Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.” In Death Wish, Charles Bronson goes on an anti-crime rampage after his wife and daughter are attacked by muggers. Why are we so attracted to this plot line?
Michael McCullough argues that, as humans, we are hardwired to want revenge when we are wronged. Brain scans of people contemplating revenge resemble brain scans of people thirsty for a sweet drink. So perhaps there are few better ways to keep people listening to a story, reading a book, or watching a movie than to draw on their biological desire for retribution.
In working on this program, we put together a montage of movie clips to evoke both the appeal of revenge and its consequences. The montage got cut in the editing process — it just didn’t fit the tone of the show — but we thought you might enjoy it on its own. Let us know what movie clips would you have used, and what are your own stories about revenge and forgiveness.
