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"[A]rresting….lively and wide-ranging….[Gopnik's] astute analysis…shows us why these thinkers and writers, who maintained 'a tragic consciousness without robbing it of a hopeful view,' have so robustly survived to our own time."
- Christopher Benfey, The New York Times Book Review
“entertaining….an introduction that brilliantly encapsulates ….Gopnik draws vividly characterized personal and intellectual portraits of each man….[he] has selected [the material] with a novelist’s skill….Gopnik’s writing is pungent, inventive and rich.”
- Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“[A] learned treatise that worships learning….Gopnik offers a meditation on each man’s most literary qualities: Lincoln’s deceptively simple legalistic language and Darwin’s crystalline powers of observation….a succinct, convincing, and moving account of how two men ripped mankind out of its past unreason and thrust it into a more enlightened age.”
-Gilbert Cruz, Time
“Gopnik casts fresh and honest light on two figures distorted by years of excessive comment, quotation, and ideological appropriation….[His] thesis is…an ambitious one, and he defends it well….[an] elegant book.”
- Josh Burek, Christian Science Monitor
“Adam Gopnik celebrates….the beauty of a perfectly calibrated argument….Gopnik revels in the revolutionary ideas that helped create our ‘moral modernity’ as he reveals the complex characters who unearthed startling truths about nature, human and otherwise.”
- Cathleen Medwick, O: The Oprah Magazine
“elegant, intelligent meditation on skepticism and the making of the liberal mind….intriguing hypothesis–that [Lincoln and Darwin] weren’t ever, actually, in natural conflict: The real enemy of religion isn’t science, [Gopnik] says, it’s history.”
- David Wallace-Wells, The New York Observer
“thoughtful meditation on the contemporary meaning of the lives of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln….[Gopnik] offers an eloquent and elegant comparison of two great men
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