Banquet at Delmonico's - Barry Werth

I recently read a book by Barry Werth entitled Banquet at Delmonico's. It purports to explain the big debate in this country about evolution at the end of the 19th century. That debate, after all, was extremely important. Edmund Spencer's phrase "survival of the fittest" was used to justify imperial expansion all over the world. Both Spencer and Darwin himself were extremely famous and influential men on both sides of the Atlantic.

Werth attempts to describe the debate as it moved to this side of the Atlantic and increasingly became accepted not as a fantastic theory, but as solid fact. To do that, he follows the lives of several men over a span of more than a decade.

He does a good job explaining their daily movements and personal correspondences, but the book mystifyingly lacks any detailed discussion of the particularities of either Spencer or Darwin's ideas. He sets up an ideological competition between Darwin and Spencer, but the reader is never treated to its nuances. We assume it exists, but we never learn its particularities.

Instead, Werth primarily concerns himself with where the main characters were, who they were debating with, and what books they were writing. He spends chapter after chapter describing in exhaustive detail about the alleged affair between Henry Ward Beecher and one of his female parishioners without explaining why the affair was important to the debate concerning evolution. Was it because the affair had a transformative effect on Beecher himself? Did it discredit him? Did it change his viewpoints concerning evolution? Werth never explains.

It's a well researched, pretty well written book. But Werth's apparent insecurity with discussing the ideological debate - the very subject of his book, no less - is a big flaw. It's interesting to read about the comings and goings of famous men, but in the end that's all the book has to offer.