About the Book
A New Yorker and Economist Best Book of the Year Two hundred years of modern science and culture told through one family history.
This momentous biography tells the story of the Huxleys: the Victorian natural historian T. H. Huxley ("Darwin's Bulldog") and his grandson, the scientist, conservationist, and zoologist Julian Huxley. Between them, they communicated to the world the great modern story of the theory of evolution by natural selection. In The Huxleys, celebrated historian Alison Bashford writes seamlessly about these omnivorous intellects together, almost as if they were a single man whose long, vital life bookended the colossal shifts in world history from the age of sail to the Space Age, and from colonial wars to world wars to the cold war.
The Huxleys' specialty was evolution in all its forms--at the grandest level of species, deep time, the Earth, and at the most personal and intimate. They illuminated the problems and wonders of the modern world and they fundamentally shaped how we see ourselves, as individuals and as a species.
But perhaps their greatest subject was themselves. Bashford's engaging, brilliantly ambitious book interweaves the Huxleys' momentous public achievements with their private triumphs and tragedies. The result is the history of a family, but also a history of humanity grappling with its place in nature. This book shows how much we owe--for better or worse--to the unceasing curiosity, self-absorption, and enthusiasm of a small, strange group of men and women.
About the Author :
Alison Bashford is Scientia Professor in History, director of the Laureate Centre for History and Population, and codirector of the New Earth Histories Research Program at the University of New South Wales in Australia. In 2021, she received the Dan David Prize for her contributions to the history of medicine.
Review :
"Alison Bashford skilfully connects two fascinating scientific lives to create An Intimate History of Evolution. Bashford's work unfolds the evolving interests of Thomas Henry and Julian Huxley across a range of different scientific fields that they interacted with and influenced for decades. As such, this work moves beyond a multigenerational biography to integrate the development of biological and environmental sciences with monumental social, political, intellectual, and religious changes between 1825 and 1975."-- "Isis"
"The Huxleys is an ambitious and riveting book that retraces the changes that occurred in multiple scientific fields, 'from the age of sail to the space age' (xxiii), through the lives of Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) and his grandson Julian Huxley (1887-1975). The book can be read as an original and successful experiment in scientific biography. . . . Beyond its scope and its approach to biography, The Huxleys is remarkable for another reason: its extensive and attentive reference to visual sources. Photographs, paintings, sculptures, taxidermy, drawings, watercolors, engravings, fingerprints, frontispieces, and even a printed tee shirt, the book weaves together intimate images of the Huxley family with the history of the visual and multimedia culture of science across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, pondering the genealogy of today's science communication and its cultural renderings of 'nature.'"-- "Metascience"
"A daring and joyously intelligent book on Huxley, his family, and their immense legacy. . . . The intellectual vigor, the capacity to formulate startling ideas, the books and lectures, the committees and public campaigns, the sheer weight of deskwork, to say nothing of the disturbed minds and households of the Huxleys could make a cluttered or shapeless narrative. It is an astounding achievement that Bashford has transformed such a super-abundance of material into a richly rewarding and comprehensible book. The Huxleys brings the reader into easy familiarity with great minds at work."--Richard Davenport-Hines "Wall Street Journal"
"A sweeping, intelligent look at a trailblazing family. . . . 'The layers of Huxley introspection were endless, ' writes historian Bashford in her deftly crafted biography of this illustrious British family. Throughout The Huxleys, Bashford shows the impact of Huxley introspection on science, literature, religion, society, and one another for almost two centuries. . . . With the book's subtitle--An Intimate History of Evolution--Bashford makes clear that just as evolution can explain populations over the course of millennia, it can also shed light on a family like the Huxleys within the span of a few generations."--Paula Tarnapol Whitacre "Washington Independent Review of Books"
"Fifty years ago (when I was a very young scholar), I was asked to write an essay review of some recently published books about the Huxleys. None of them in my view, including Julian Huxley's own volume of Memories, did justice to their subjects' scientific achievements and social concerns. Half a century later we now have Bashford's. . . . It has most definitely been worth the wait. Indeed this work is the crowning achievement of her distinguished career. . . . Magnificent."-- "Australian Book Review"
"It was fitting for a man known as 'Darwin's bulldog' that his descendants inherited many of his traits--not just his talents but also his affinity for certain sweeping questions: Who are we? What is our place in nature? How can we design morality and religion in a world informed by science? In The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution, the historian Bashford moves across the Huxley generations, tracing how Thomas Henry and his gifted brood struggled to answer these questions, in the process shaping outlooks we hold today. . . . Evolution is a messy, nuanced, protean picture of our origins. It offers many stories, yet those which we choose to tell have their own momentum. It can serve as a banner of our common humanity or as a narrative of our staggering differences. It can be wielded to fight racism or weaponized to support oppression. It can inspire new forms of piety or be called on to destroy dogma. The social meanings of evolution, like so much else, are part of a grander inheritance."--Manvir Singh "New Yorker, "Best Books of 2022""
"T.H.'s coining of the word 'agnostic' and Julian's promotion of the word 'transhumanism' are signs of their ability both to anticipate and to influence the direction of ideas. A joint biography situating them in their times is a promising project. With The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution, Bashford succeeds in telling a revealing story of the transmutation of thought within and beyond biology over a crucial century and a half."-- "New Criterion"
