New Yorker writer Gopnik is intrigued that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin both were born on February 12, 1809. They never met and arrived amid opposite circumstances of class and place: Darwin, an heir to the Wedgwood ceramics fortune, grew up among the comforts of the English countryside, while every American recalls the privations of Lincoln’s Kentucky log cabin. Still, Gopnik’s philosophical exploration of their separate lives convinces the reader that “coincidence is the vernacular of history.”

One key link between the two lies in their dedication to the strategic craft of writing: Lincoln’s legend obscures both his accomplishments as a shrewd attorney and ambitious orator, and his acquaintance with death on both a grand and personal scale. Like Lincoln, Darwin was affected forever by the demise of a beloved child. Unlike him, Darwin’s reputation is still closely linked to his literary accomplishments, as “the one indisputably great scientist whose scientific work is still read by amateurs.” Gopnik’s narrative deftly circles back upon key tableaux in these public lives: for Lincoln, his murder by a racist terrorist following the war that caused him such anguish. And for Darwin, it’s the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species (an instant best-seller, hijacked ever since in support of crackpot racism). These ironies bolster Gopnik’s conclusion that our admiration for them masks pessimism toward their accomplishments: “That we remember them well doesn’t mean they won.”

Mike Newirth