Stone helps to demythologize the great naturalist and thus make him more accessible to the reader by presenting him within the circle of brilliant scientists of nineteenth-century England such as Charles Lyell, Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley, and Alfred Wallace. While presenting these learned men in terms a twentieth century reader can understand, Stone evokes Darwin's character, making him warmly, humanly appealing as well as possessing characteristics of a genius.

Stone captures Darwin's exterior defenses, the socially retiring modesty which his visitors often took as genuine simplicity; his private life is also illuminated as the biographer presents a man devotedly loved and nursed by a loving wife who feels the strain of her husband's work.

As various critics point out, Darwin, a man full of contradictions, was not an easy fellow to capture. He was a gregarious recluse; an energetic in valid; modest yet eager for scientific immortality; meticulous...