Reading the Rocks: How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life

This lively and eclectic collection of characters brought passion, eccentricity and towering intellect to geology and Brenda Maddox in Reading the Rocks does them full justice, bringing them to vivid life. It is no coincidence that Charles Darwin was a keen geologist. The effect is absorbing, revelatory and strikingly original.. The new science of geology was pursued by this assorted band because it opened a window on Earth's ancient past. The individual stories of these first geologists, their hope and fears, triumphs and disappointments, the theological, philosophical and scientific debates their findings provoked, and the way that as a group, they were to change irrevocably and dramatically our understanding of the world is told by Brenda Maddox with a storyteller's skill and a fellow scientist's understanding. These first geologists were made up primarily, and inevitably, of gentlemen with the necessary wealth to support their intere

Her biographies of Elizabeth Taylor, D. Born in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, Brenda Maddox graduated from Harvard University (then Radcliffe) before moving to Britain to study at the London School of Economics. 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

The rock/collecting geek in me loved this enthralling group biography in Lunar Men-style of the first geologist -- A History Pick of the Month * Bookseller * Reading the Rocks, the latest book by the frighteningly prolific biographer Brenda Maddox, relates how a handful of British men - and one woman - blasted out the intellectual cutting through which the theory of natural selection would follow Maddox, whose previous biographical scalps include George Eliot, DH Lawrence and Rosalind Franklin, has a fine eye for idiosyncrasy, the primacy of money and the sheer squawking rivalrousness of the academic world' -- Oliver Moody * The Times * 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 *