Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolutio

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Amazon Best of the Month, January 2009: Banquet at Delmonico's is a fascinating look at how the theory of evolution provided a much-needed challenge to 19th-century America. Although evolution itself was hardly a new concept--scholars had pondered transmutation and common descent for centuries--naturalist Charles Darwin ignited an intellectual bonfire during the 1860s with his hypothesis of natural selection. Author Barry Werth explains how the uproar reached far beyond the scientific community, as evolutionary ideas such as "survival of the fittest" (a phrase coined not by Darwin, but by English philosopher Herbert Spencer) became rallying cries for leaders in business, theology, and government. Steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie gushed that "light came as in a flood and all was clear" while reading the works of Darwin and Spencer, while preacher Henry Ward Beecher embraced his role as a "Christian evolutionist." With post-Civil War America growing increasingly uneasy over irreconcilable differences between the modern world and old truths of theology, Werth thoughtfully explores how a bold leap into a new school of thought rejuvenated a weary nation. - Dave Callanan