Author: A. N. Wilson File Type: epub A radical reappraisal of Charles Darwin from the bestselling author of *Victoria A Life.*With the publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwinhailed as the man who discovered evolutionwas propelled into the pantheon of great scientific thinkers, alongside Galileo, Copernicus, and Newton. Eminent writer A. N. Wilson challenges this long-held assumption. Contextualizing Darwin and his ideas, he offers a groundbreaking critical look at this revered figure in modern science.In this beautifully written, deeply erudite portrait, Wilson argues that Darwin was not an original scientific thinker, but a ruthless and determined self-promoter who did not credit the many great sages whose ideas he advanced in his book. Furthermore, Wilson contends that religion and Darwinism have much more in common than it would seem, for the acceptance of Darwins theory involves a pretty significant leap of faith.Armed with an extraordinary breadth of knowledge, Wilson explores how Darwin and his theory were very much a product of their place and time. The Survival of the Fittest was really the Survival of Middle Class families like the Darwinsmembers of a relatively new economic strata who benefited from the rising Industrial Revolution at the expense of the working classes. Following Darwins theory, the wretched state of the poor was an outcome of nature, not the greed and neglect of the moneyed classes. In a paradigm-shifting conclusion, Wilson suggests that it remains to be seen, as this class dies out, whether the Darwinian idea will survive, or whether it, like other Victorian fads, will become a footnote in our intellectual history.Brilliant, daring, and ambitious, Charles Darwin explores this legendary man as never before, and challenges us to reconsider our understanding of both Darwin and modern science itself. **

Author: Emma Kuby File Type: pdf In 1949, as Cold War tensions in Europe mounted, French intellectual and former Buchenwald inmate David Rousset called upon fellow concentration camp survivors to denounce the Soviet Gulag as a hallucinatory repetition of Nazi Germanys most terrible crime. In Political Survivors, Emma Kuby tells the riveting story of what followed his appeal, as prominent members of the wartime Resistance from throughout Western Europe united to campaign against the continued existence of inhumane internment systems around the world. The International Commission against the Concentration Camp Regime brought together those originally deported for acts of anti-Nazi political activity who believed that their unlikely survival incurred a duty to bear witness for other victims. Over the course of the next decade, these pioneering activists crusaded to expose political imprisonment, forced labor, and other crimes against humanity in Francos Spain, Maoist China, French Algeria, and beyond. Until now, the CIAs secret funding of Roussets movement has remained in the shadows. Kuby reveals this clandestine arrangement between European camp survivors and American intelligence agents. She also brings to light how Jewish Holocaust victims were systematically excluded from Commission membership a choice that fueled the groups rise, but also helped lead to its premature downfall. The history that she unearths provides a striking new vision of how wartime memory shaped European intellectual life and ideological struggle after 1945, showing that the key lessons Western Europeans drew from the war centered on the camp, imagined first and foremost as a site of political repression rather than ethnic genocide. Political Survivors argues that Cold War dogma and acrimony, tied to a distorted understanding of WWIIs chief atrocities, overshadowed the humanitarian possibilities of the nascent anti-concentration camp movement as Europe confronted the violent decolonizing struggles of the 1950s.**ReviewA meticulous, nuanced look inside the deeply fraught postwar political theater in France and Europe.(Kirkus Reviews) Political Survivors illuminates the failed dream of ending concentration camps around the globe.Like an investigative journalist, Emma Kuby reveals how Cold War intrigue shaped the International Commission Against the Concentration Camp Regime, self-appointed to give voice to victims of state atrocity.She uncovers the moving story of the personal disagreements and significant accomplishments that remain part of its legacy.(Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night) Political Survivors is a breakthrough in the study of public ethics in the twentieth century. Kuby recovers the history of the French and transnational movement of victims of concentration camps against the repetition of similar horrors, showing how our world of human rights and Holocaust memory could have been very different. A masterful achievement.(Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough) Brilliant and original, Political Survivors combines a new, more probing form of political history with an innovative, more populist kind of intellectual history. From Auschwitz to Algeria,from national victimhood in the Occupation to national atrocity in Algeria, Kuby re-thinks the larger arc of French history in the postwar period.(Mary Louise Roberts, author of What Soldiers Do) Political Survivors is a compelling study of intellectual activism in the shifting contexts of the Cold War and decolonization. Kubys luminous prose deepens our understanding of how such prominent figures as David Rousset, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Germaine Tillion struggled to apply the lessons of wartime deportations to their own divided times. (Alice L. Conklin, author of In the Museum of Man)