Description: A rich and exuberant group biography of the early geologists, the people who were first to excavate from the layers of the world its buried history.
Brief description:
Born in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, Brenda Maddox graduated from Harvard University (then Radcliffe) before moving to Britain to study at the London School of Economics. Her biographies of Elizabeth Taylor, D. H. Lawrence, Nora Joyce, W. B. Yeats and Rosalind Franklin have been widely acclaimed and she has won the Los Angeles Times Biography Award, the Silver PEN Award, the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger and the Whitbread Biography Prize. She was previously a senior editor at the Economist, and has also regularly contributed to the BBC as a commentator, to the New York Times as a critic, and was a longstanding columnist for The Times and the Daily Telegraph.
She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999 and was member of the Editorial Board of British Journalism Review and a past chairman of the Broadcasting Press Guild; she remains a vice-president of the Hay-on-Wye Festival of Literature. Maddox has two children and two stepchildren and lives in London and mid-Wales.
Review Quotes:
"Award-winning biographer Maddox nicely blends literary and scientific biography in this study of 19th-century British geology and its practitioners, some of them poets as well as naturalists." --Kirkus Review
"[I]n this engaging group biography ... Maddox distills the scientific exploration of [geology] into the stories of the vibrant pioneers who pushed to increase our understanding of the world's long history and humanity's place in it." --Booklist "[T]his is an accessible, enjoyable, and authoritative read. Anyone curious about evolution, geology, or paleontology's roots won't want to miss this work." --Library Journal "Brenda Maddox's new book is about this magic moment in the history of modern geology ... the overall result is a fascinating picture of scientific life, and of fundamental changes in thinking, over a vital half-century." --Daily Telegraph "Maddox's book is a fascinating group biography of the pioneers of geology who eventually inspired Charles Darwin to develop his theory of evolution ... Maddox brings to life the personalities of the time and conjures superbly the excitement and controversy that the new science caused." --Ian Critchley, Sunday Times