Draws upon recent discoveries and research to recount the rise and fall of the dinosaurs, as dominant, warm-blooded animals, and to reassess their intelligence, agility, physiological complexity, and advanced social behavior

Hot Blooded Dinosaurs

Science & Math

Desmond, Adrian

Earth Sciences

RANDOM HOUSE UK

This biography of Charles Darwin attempts to capture the private unknown life of the real man - the gambling and gluttony at Cambridge, his gruelling trip round the globe, his intimate family life, worries about persecution and thoughts about God. Central to all of this, his pioneering efforts on the theory of evolution now that recent studies have overturned the commonplace views of Darwin that have held for more than a century.

Darwin

Biographies & Memoirs

Penguin Books, Limited (UK)

T.H. Huxley (1825-1895) - "Darwin's bulldog" - led a far more fascinating and outgoing life than the reclusive Darwin. He did battle with God and Gladstone, sat on royal commissions and campaigned for elementary education. He carried Darwin's fight to the public and outraged the old order with his talk of the material basis of life. It was a life lived at high speed and to the full, embracing all the Victorian hopes and fears. Desperately trying to scratch a living in his young days, he suffered mental collapses as he failed to bring his fiancee over from Sydney (he raised the cash after four years). The author of this book uses the life of Huxley to illustrate and illuminate the second - and far more turbulent - half of the 19th century. Adrian Desmond is the author of "Darwin" which won the James Tait Black Prize in Britain, the Comisso Prize in Italy and the Watson Davis Prize in America.

Huxley the Devil's Disciple

Penguin Books Canada, Limited

In this remarkable book Adrian Desmond and James Moore, world authorities on Darwin, give a completely new explanation of how Darwin came to his famous view of evolution, which traced all life to an ancient common ancestor. Darwin was committed to the abolition of slavery, in part because of his family's deeply held beliefs. It was his 'Sacred Cause' and at its core lay a belief in human racial unity. Desmond and Moore show how he extended to all life the idea of human brotherhood held by those who fought to abolish slavery, so developing our modern view of evolution. Desmond and Moore argue that only by understanding Darwin's Christian abolitionist inheritance can we shed new light on the perplexing mix of personal drive, public hesitancy and scientific radicalism that led him finally in 1871 to publish The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. The result is an epoch-making study of this eminent Victorian.

Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race Slavery And The Quest For Human Origins

Moore, James

History & Philosophy

Penguin Uk

Very definitive, very concise, and very interesting... From William Shakespeare to Winston Churchill, the Very Interesting People series provides authoritative bite-sized biographies of Britain's most fascinating historical figures--people whose influence and importance have stood the test of time. Each book in the series is based upon the biographical entry from the world-famous Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Charles Darwin (Very Interesting People Series)

Browne, Janet

Arts & Literature

Oxford University Press

T. H. Huxley (18251895) was Darwin's bloody-fanged bulldog. His giant scything intellect shook a prim Victorian society; his Devil's gospel” of evolution outraged. He put agnostic” into the vocabulary and cave men into the public consciousness. Adrian Desmond's fiery biography with its panoramic view of Dickensian life explains how this agent provocateur rose to become the century's greatest prophet.Synoptic in its sweep and evocative in its details, Desmond's biography reveals the poverty and opium-hazed tragedies of young Tom Huxley's life as well as the accolades and triumphs of his later years. The drug-grinder's apprentice knew sots and scandals and breakdowns that signaled a genius close to madness. As surgeon's mate on the cockroach-infested frigate Rattlesnake, he descended into hell on the Barrier Reef, but was saved by a golden-haired girl in the penal colony.Huxley pulled himself up to fight Darwin's battles in the 1860s, but left Darwin behind on the most inflammatory issues. He devasted angst-ridden Victorian society with his talk of ape ancestors, and tantalized and tormented thousands-from laborers to ladies of society, cardinals to Karl Marxwith his scintillating lectures. Out of his provocations came our image of science warring with theology. And out of them, too, came the West's new faith-agnosticism (he coined the new word).Champion of modern education, creator of an intellectually dominant profession, and president of the Royal Society, in Desmond's hands Huxley epitomizes the rise of the middle classes as the clawed power from the Anglican elite. His modern godless universe, intriguing and terrifying, millions of years in the making, was explored in his laboratory at South Kensington; his last pupil, H. G. Wells, made it the foundation of twentieth-century science fiction.Touching the crowning achievements and the crushing depths of both the man and his times, this is the epic story of a courageous genius whose life summed up the social changes from the Victorian to the modern age. Written with enormous zest and passion, Huxley is about the making of our modern Darwinian world.

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

Professionals & Academics

Basic Books

"The social construction of scientific knowledge, clearly one of the most exciting trends in the history of science in the 1890's, has made a solid stride forward with the publication of Archetypes and Ancestors. . . . Adrian Desmond set out to determine how much light might be shed on the mid-Victorian controversies over fossil reconstruction by an investigation of the ideological commitments and political programs of London paleontologists. The answer is: a great deal of light. The resulting book is thoroughly fascinating."—Philip Rehbock, American Historical Review "A sophisticated study of the colonization of scientific territory—specifically of rival attempts to design the dinosaur—and of the constructive (not just obstructive) role of social pressures in the making of 'lasting contributions' to science. Not least it is a joy to read, perkily irreverent at times and full of nice vignettes and memorable turns of phrase."—Roy Porter, Times Higher Education Supplement

Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London, 1850-1875

Biological Sciences

University of Chicago Press

Looking for the first time at the cut-price anatomy schools rather than genteel Oxbridge, Desmond winkles out pre-Darwinian evolutionary ideas in reform-minded and politically charged early nineteenth-century London. In the process, he reveals the underside of London intellectual and social life in the generation before Darwin as it has never been seen before. "The Politics of Evolution is intellectual dynamite, and certainly one of the most important books in the history of science published during the past decade."—Jim Secord, Times Literary Supplement "One of those rare books that not only stakes out new territory but demands a radical overhaul of conventional wisdom."—John Hedley Brooke, Times Higher Education Supplement

The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series)

History

Americas

Looking for the first time at the cut-price anatomy schools rather than genteel Oxbridge, Desmond winkles out pre-Darwinian evolutionary ideas in reform-minded and politically charged early nineteenth-century London. In the process, he reveals the underside of London intellectual and social life in the generation before Darwin as it has never been seen before. "The Politics of Evolution is intellectual dynamite, and certainly one of the most important books in the history of science published during the past decade."—Jim Secord, Times Literary Supplement "One of those rare books that not only stakes out new territory but demands a radical overhaul of conventional wisdom."—John Hedley Brooke, Times Higher Education Supplement

Europe

There has always been a mystery surrounding Darwin: How did this quiet, respectable gentleman come to beget one of the most radical ideas in the history of human thought? It is difficult to overstate what Darwin was risking in publishing his theory of evolution. So it must have been something very powerful—a moral fire, as Desmond and Moore put it—that helped propel him. That moral fire, they argue, was a passionate hatred of slavery. In opposition to the apologists for slavery who argued that blacks and whites had originated as separate species, Darwin believed the races belonged to the same human family. Slavery was a “sin,” and abolishing it became his “sacred cause.” By extending the abolitionists’ idea of human brotherhood to all life, Darwin developed our modern view of evolution. Drawing on a wealth of fresh manuscripts, family letters, diaries, and even ships’ logs, Desmond and Moore argue that only by acknowledging Darwin’s abolitionist heritage can we fully understand the development of his groundbreaking ideas.

Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins

Historical

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Desmond, Adrian. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Desmond, Adrian

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Desmond, Adrian. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Hot Blooded Dinosaurs

Darwin

Huxley the Devil's Disciple

Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race Slavery And The Quest For Human Origins

Charles Darwin (Very Interesting People Series)

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

Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London, 1850-1875

The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series)

The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series)

Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins