Graeme's review
The Voyage of the Beagle: Charles Darwin's Journal of Researches (Penguin Classics) by Charles Darwin
This book is quite boring. I was hoping for an adventurous travel diary / nature documentary, and there are flashes of those elements, as well as some unexpectedly penetrating sociological reflections on South America in the 1830s (an area and time about which I knew nothing). And when he wants to be, Darwin can be an entertaining writer, as with this gem of a sentence:
"He [a fox:] was so intently absorbed in watching their [some sailors:] maneuvers, that I was able, by walking up behind, to knock him on the head with my geological hammer."
But Darwin was a naturalist, not a zoologist, and the majority of the text is dry geological conjecture and observation.
"He [a fox:] was so intently absorbed in watching their [some sailors:] maneuvers, that I was able, by walking up behind, to knock him on the head with my geological hammer."
But Darwin was a naturalist, not a zoologist, and the majority of the text is dry geological conjecture and observation.
