The Power of Life

“[Riskin] is an excellent stylist and…shines as a cultural historian, with enthralling tales of botanic gardens and early zoos.” —Wall Street Journal

“Engaging. . . . In a time when science’s boundaries were less stable, Lamarck’s poetic theories had significant influence, and its traces can even be detected in contemporary epigenetics.” —The New Yorker

“A remarkably transformative work. . . . Thanks to Jessica Riskin, the mundane has once again become magical.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“A truly remarkable achievement, at once a delightfully wry and wildly entertaining biography of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and a riveting intellectual history of the tumultuous emergence of “biology” (a word Lamarck coined). The long-underrated and much-maligned professor of insects and worms is vindicated as the founder of a set of revolutionary ideas whose time, nearly two centuries after his death, has come at last.” —Jill Lepore, professor of American history, Harvard University; author of These Truths and We the People

“How thrilling to learn that Lamarck was right all along about the role of creativity and life experience in guiding evolutionary change. A gorgeous story of human nature and animal behavior—and of the way science itself evolves.”
—Dava Sobel, author of Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter

“An intriguing look at the life of a scientist who changed the way we look at life.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Jessica Riskin writes with the verve and vision of the very best literary novelists. A brilliant reclamation of a more expansive and poetic mode of science that still reads today as subversive—and is perhaps more timely and urgent than ever.”
—Meghan O’Gieblyn, author of God, Human, Animal, Machine

“[T]his fresh reconsideration. . . reevaluates the ideas of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the 18th-century French naturalist who was castigated for his claim that organisms’ acquired characteristics can be passed down to their offspring. . . .Historians and scientists will find much to savor.” —Publishers Weekly

“Transportive and engaging. . . . Richly detailed yet accessible, this work recenters a vital voice in the history of evolutionary thought.” —Library Journal

“Jessica Riskin has given us that rarity, a work of pathbreaking intellectual history that is also marvelously entertaining. Every chapter sparkles with insight, wit, and keenly drawn portraits.”
—David A. Bell, professor of history, Princeton University, and author of Napoleon: A Concise Biography

“The Power of Life is nothing less than an anatomy of Lamarck’s dangerous idea: living organisms are not passive mechanisms but agents that shape their worlds and the narrative of their species across time. With her storytelling gifts and finely tuned humor, Riskin takes her reader on a great adventure as she traces the history of a radical thinker whose time, it seems, has finally arrived.”
—Siri Hustvedt, author of What I Loved and The Blazing World