There are many biographies of Darwin, some more comprehensive and some treating specific aspects of his life and career.1 There are also, of course, countless critical essays elucidating, challenging, and commentating on his theory of evolution by natural selection.2 Few studies, however, combine an engaging biographical style with high-level scholarship.
In Columbus' time there was speculation that other Europeans had made the trip in ancient or contemporary times; Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés records this in his General y natural historia de las Indias of 1526, which includes biographical information on Columbus.
We tend to forget this "biographical" dimension, but it radically changed the "natural history" of cancer and its social meanings.
It comes complete with authoritative mezzanines reached by spiral stairs; glass cases displaying real Teddy bears alongside their own biographical notes; and darkly varnished vitrines, intended to recall natural-history galleries, filled with Teddy-bear ephemera.
But when the NFL Network was looking for a major biographical documentary to run this season, one about Belichick was a natural — and all the filming was done, so much that two parts were required.
Pius II exploits the plasticity of biographical art by creating opportunities especially when writing of himself as the connoisseur of natural beauties and antiquities for effective autobiographical narration.
"There is something to be said for the notion that the body of work that's most remembered is that in which the person seems to be the most natural, where we feel the casting has been ideal," says David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film.
It's natural to suppose that the latter is his main concern, and that the notion of a full-length biographical study for the popular market was a side-project pegged to the 50th anniversary of Lewis's death this year.
Interesting biographical material.
