I was sharing my affection for Adam Gopnik’s book with a friend. It’s fit the bill for a book of worthy writing and worthy reading. Worth posting a bit from an interview with Gopnik here.
Britannica: Much of Angels and Ages, your latest book, focuses on the literary styles of Abraham Lincoln, whose oratory was grounded in legal argument, and Charles Darwin, a meticulous observer whom you characterize as writing about science like a novelist. What were the biggest similarities and biggest differences between Lincoln’s and Darwin’s rhetoric?
Gopnik: The similarity lies in their precision, and in their replacement of the old rhetoric of honor and exhortation by a new rhetoric of argument and observation, and by their insistence on making that new rhetoric popular. Lincoln’s greatest speeches – the Cooper Union speech of 1859, for instance, which “made him President” by one account – are closely reasoned and even legalistic arguments: he goes painstakingly through the history of the early American Congress to see if the Founders intended Congress to rule on slavery as a national question. Only then is the moral issue introduced. Darwin, writing the most ambitious work on biology in its history, first of all publishes it for a popular audience, as a “trade” book, and then introduces it as a homely tale of dogs and pigeons. Darwin began with the narrow language of the naturalist, Lincoln with the close reasoning of the lawyer, and both aimed to persuade, not to intimidate.
The biggest difference is that, Darwin was a persuader speaking softly to an audience of intimates, as all reading audiences are; Lincoln was a politician, speaking clearly, and loudly, to a public gathering. Lincoln had to be terse where Darwin was voluble, and grand where Darwin was modest.
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