shows a knack not only for a pungent sort of historical reconstruction but also for characters of craggy fragility.” -Richard Bernstein, The New York Times “A high-spirited, adventuresome, idiosyncratic ramble through the history of science.
Darwin’s Shooter demonstrates, is driven by forces more nuanced and mysterious than the crude survival of the fittest.” -Walter Kirn, Time fully imagined and imbued with intellectual curiosity.” -Emily Barton, The New York Times Book Review McDonald’s prose is uniformly well turned, and even his minor characters are observed with accuracy and humor. Darwin’s words appear to the contemporary audience with the full weight of revelation they must have held for their first readers. The reader experiences an almost visceral thrill. of Darwin’s failure to recognize Covington’s contribution to his work, and of Covington’s concern that Darwin’s project has been, all along, to disprove the existence of God. Like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, forces MacCracken to listen to his tale of betrayal. Darwin’s Shooter captures its time with rare and dazzling skill, evoking an unforgettable-but forgotten-man at a watershed moment in history. Beset by guilt over participating in a work that will shake the human worldview to its foundations, he nonetheless wonders what part of himself might be reflected in Darwin’s oeuvre. Now a crusty, eccentric, near-deaf old man, Covington has settled in Australia and is awaiting the arrival of the first copy of On the Origin of Species.
Aboard the HMS Beagle, he enters the service of Charles Darwin as an energetic and precocious fifteen-year-old, and in the course of their voyages together he shoots and collects hundreds of specimens for his “gent,” specimens that become fundamental to the formulation of Darwin’s theory of evolution. From one of Australia’s most acclaimed authors, a dazzling and deeply imagined exploration of ambition, natural marvels, and scientific discovery, and one of history’s most significant crises of faith.Īs a boy of thirteen, Syms Covington leaves his home in Bedford and goes to sea, passing into manhood as he sails the world, surveying Patagonia, and losing his virginity in the Pampas.
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