{"product_id":"the-darwin-conspiracy-isbn-9781400034833","title":"The Darwin Conspiracy","description":"From the author of the bestselling \u003ci\u003eNeanderthal \u003c\/i\u003ecomes this novel of gripping suspense and scientific conquest–a page-turning historical mystery that brilliantly explores the intrigue behind Darwin and his theory of evolution.It’s 1831, and aboard HMS \u003ci\u003eBeagle \u003c\/i\u003ethe young Charles Darwin sets off down the English Channel for South America. More than 150 years later, two ambitious scholars pursuing their obsession with Darwin (and with each other) come across the diaries and letters of Darwin’s daughter. What they discover is a maze of violent rivalries, petty deceptions, and jealously guarded secrets, and the extraordinary story of an expedition embarked upon by two men. Only one returned–and changed history forever.“An entertaining, fast-paced read.” –\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e“Darnton has playfully created and solved several mysteries revolving around events during Charles Darwin’s early voyage on the \u003ci\u003eBeagle\u003c\/i\u003e.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e “Darnton has a good feel for both the Victorian era and the modern scientific milieu.” –\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e“An elaborate scientific thriller, rich with detail and the pacing of a good murder mystery.” –\u003ci\u003eWinston-Salem Journal\u003c\/i\u003e“A fast-paced, intriguing and exciting story.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Decatur Daily\u003c\/i\u003eJohn Darnton has worked for thirty-nine years as a reporter, editor, and foreign correspondent for \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e. He was awarded two George Polk Awards for his coverage of Africa and Eastern Europe, and the Pulitzer Prize for his stories smuggled out of Poland during the period of martial law. He lives in New York.Hugh spotted the boat while it was still a dot on the horizon and watched  it approach the island, making a wide, white arc. He shaded his eyes but  still he had to squint against the shards of reflected light. Already the  morning sun had cut through the haze to lay a shimmering sword on the  water.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    All around him the birds swooped and darted in the cacophonous morning  feeding—hundreds of them, screaming swallow-tailed gulls, brown noddies,  boobies homing in with fish dangling in their beaks. A frigate circled  behind a gull, yanked its tail feathers to open the gullet, then made a  corkscrew dive to grab the catch—a flash of acrobatic violence that had  long since ceased to amaze him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The boat appeared to be a panga, but that was odd: supplies weren’t due  for days. Hugh fixed his stare on the dark silhouette of the driver. He  looked like Raoul, the way he leaned into the wind, one arm trailing back  on the throttle.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Hugh dropped his canvas tool bag near the mist net and started down. The  black rocks were streaked white and gray with guano, which stank in the  windless air and made the lava slippery, but he knew the footholds  perfectly. The heat pressed down on him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When he reached the bottom of the cliffside, Raoul was already there. He  idled the swaying panga a few feet from the landing rock,   a narrow ledge that was washed by an ankle-deep wave every few   seconds.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Amigo,” shouted Raoul, grinning behind dark glasses.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Hey, Cowboy,” said Hugh. He coughed to clear his throat—it had been a  long time since he had talked to anybody.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Raoul was wearing pressed khaki shorts, a Yankees cap over his thick black  hair at a jaunty angle, and a dark blue jersey with the insignia of the  Galapagos National Park on the left breast pocket.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Just stopping by,” he said. “What’s new?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Not much.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I thought you will be totally crazy by now.” His English was almost  perfect but sometimes an odd phrasing gave him away.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “No, not totally. But I’m working on it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “So, how’s the ermitano?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “The what?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Ermitano,” Raoul repeated. “How do you say that?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Hermit.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Raoul nodded and regarded him closely. “So, how’re you doing?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Fine,” lied Hugh.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Raoul looked away.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I brought two chimbuzos.” He gestured with his chin to two water barrels  strapped to the mid-seat. “Help me to deliver them.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Hugh leapt into the boat, unstrapped a barrel, and hoisted it over his  right shoulder. The weight threw off his balance and he tottered like a  drunken sailor and almost fell into the water.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Not like that,” said Raoul. “Put them overboard and shove them to the  mat. Then you climb up and pick them up.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The mat, short for “welcome mat,” was the nickname the researchers called  the rocky ledge. Raoul had hung around them so long, help-  ing out now and then because he admired what they were doing, that he was  picking up their lingo.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Hugh finally got both barrels ashore and lugged them up to the beginning  of the path. He was dripping with sweat by the time he returned.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Want to come on shore, stay a while?” he asked. The offer was  disingenuous. The water was too deep to anchor—more than eighty feet  straight down—and if the panga docked, the waves would smash it against  the rocks.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I can’t stay. I just wanted to say hello. How’re your crazy birds—  getting thirsty, no?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “The heat’s rough on them. Some are dying.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Raoul shook his head. “How many days without rain?” he asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Today is two hundred something, two hundred twenty-five, I think.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Raoul whistled and shook his head again, a fatalistic gesture, and lit a  cigarette.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    They talked for a while about the study. Raoul was always eager to hear  how it was going. He had once said that if he came back to earth a second  time that was what he wanted to do—camp out and study birds. Hugh thought  that Raoul had no idea what it was really like—the solitude, the fatigue  and boredom and endless repetition of extremes, boiling during the day and  then at night when the temperature dropped forty degrees, lying in your  sleeping bag and shivering so violently you can’t go to sleep even though  you’re exhausted. Anything can sound glamorous until you do it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Say,” Raoul said lightly, “I hear you’re getting company. Two more guys  coming out.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Yeah—so I’m told.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Raoul looked quizzical.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Sat phone,” explained Hugh. “Satellite. I got a call day before  yesterday. The thing scared the shit out of me when it rang.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Do you know them?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “No, I don’t think so. I don’t know anybody in the project, really.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “What are their names?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I don’t know.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You didn’t ask?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “No.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Raoul paused a moment, then looked at him closely. “Hombre, you okay? You  don’t look so good.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “No, I’m fine.” Pause. “Thanks.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “All that pink skin.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    That was a joke. Hugh had been burned and tanned so many times that his  skin had turned a leathery brown. His lips were swollen and cracked,  despite the Chap Stick, and his eyebrows were bleached blond.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You think you ready to share this paradise with other people?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Sure thing,” said Hugh, but his voice sounded uncertain.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Raoul turned and looked out to sea. Far away the dark profile of a ship  could be seen moving quickly with a funnel of gulls circling it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “The Neptune,” he said. “More tourists for the Enchanted Isles.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Whoever thought that one up deserves a medal,” said Hugh. He could see by  the shadow that crossed Raoul’s face that the remark was hurtful. The  depth of Equadorean nationalism always amazed him. He smiled, pretending  he was joking.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “More work for me.” Raoul shrugged. “Well, tengo que trabajar.” He flicked  his cigarette way off into the water and gave a little wave from the hip.  “Ciao.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Ciao. Thanks for the water.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Don’t drink it all right now.” Raoul grinned as he turned the panga,  gunned the motor, and pulled out so fast the bow rose up like a surfboard.  Hugh stared after him until the boat disappeared behind the island.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He carried the chimbuzos one at a time up the long path that wound up the  south face of the volcano and then down past the campsite   into the bottom of the crater, where in theory it was a degree or two  cooler—but only in theory. On hot days, even here, he had seen the  green-footed boobies shifting from one webbed foot to the other on the  scorching rocks.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He looked at his watch. Shit. Almost seven o’clock. He had forgotten about  the mist net—he was sure he had seen a bird trapped there, maybe two. He  had to hurry and free them before they died in the quickening morning  heat. Once, months ago, before he got the routine down, he had lost a bird  that way. They were surprisingly resilient if you handled them right, but  if you made a mistake, like leaving them trapped in   the mist net too long, they were as fragile as twigs. That time, he had  recorded the death dutifully in the log, without explanation, in a single  concocted word: “ornithocide.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    At the top of the island it was even hotter. He grabbed his bag and looked  at the net. Sure enough, there were two birds, small dark cocoons that  rippled as he touched them. He reached in and held one to his chest while  he deftly lifted off the black threads so thin they caught the birds in  flight. As he untangled the mesh from the feathers he suddenly had a  memory: playing badminton as a young boy during long summer evenings,  those moments when the plastic bird hurled into the net and had to be  carefully extracted.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He now saw the finch’s color, black mottled with gray and dusty white. A  cactus finch—Geospiza scandens—very common, no surprise there. He held it  tightly in his left fist and raised it to look at it. The eyes, deep  brown, looked back, and he could feel the tiny heart tickling his palm. He  checked the bands—a green and black one on the left leg and a blue one on  the right—and identified him in the register. Number ACU-906. A previous  researcher had jotted down a nickname, Smooches, in a rounded, girlish  American script.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    After all this time Hugh still had trouble identifying more than a dozen  finches by their nicknames, the ones that hung around the campsite.  Spotting them was a point of pride with the researchers, he gathered; they  told stories of sitting around the rocks and rattling off the names of  thirty or forty at a shot. “You’ll get to know them in no time,” he had  been told at the farewell pep talk by Peter Simons, a legend in the field.  “Just stretch out your arm and they’ll land on it.” That part was true at  least. He was pleasantly surprised the first week when he was measuring a  small finch and another came to perch on his bare knee and peer at him,  its head cocking from one side to the other. At times like that they  seemed curious and intelligent. But at other times—like when he forgot to  cover the coffeepot and a bird almost dove in and drowned—it was hard not  to think of them as stupid.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    That was back before Victor left. At first it was a relief to be  alone—solitude was what he had been looking for, part of his penitence—but  as weeks stretched into months, the loneliness he had sought became almost  too much to bear. Then when the rainy season didn’t come and the lava  island turned into a black frying pan stuck way out in the ocean, at times  he actually wondered if he could keep going. But of course he did. He had  known he would—in that way at least, in brute staying power, he was  strong. It was his psyche that was brittle.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He pulled out a pair of calipers and measured the bird’s wing and wrote it  in the notebook, tattered over the years and swollen from the rain despite  its waterproof cover. The bird froze as he measured its beak—the  all-important beak—its length, width, and depth. Since 1973, when Simons  and his wife, Agatha, first came here, generations of graduate students  had braved the miserable conditions to measure thousands upon thousands of  beaks and search for meaning among the minute variations.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Hugh freed the bird and it flew off a few yards and landed on a cactus,  shaking its feathers. He recorded the second bird and walked around to the  north rim to check the traps. He could tell by looking that none had  sprung shut. He went back to the campsite and fixed breakfast, watery  scrambled eggs made from powder and weak coffee from used grinds. Then he  went to the top of the island again to rest and look out over the  blue-green water, choppy with waves from the treacherous currents. He sat  in his familiar place—the smooth rocks, already hot, formed a throne that  fit his rear. He could see for miles.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Darwin was no fool. He didn’t like it here either.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Hugh sometimes talked to himself. Or—even stranger—sometimes he couldn’t  tell whether he had been thinking the words or saying them aloud. Lately,  his interior monologues were becoming oddly disjointed, especially during  the long hours when he worked hard under the hot sun. Half thoughts  flashed through his mind, phrases repeating themselves over and over,  admonitions and observations from himself to himself, sometimes addressed  in the second person, such as: If it was Hell you’re looking for, buddy,  you’ve come to the right place.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And it had been Hell that he’d looked for, no doubt about that.   Even the name of the island—Sin Nombre—had exerted an attraction the  moment he heard it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    So how about it? Was he willing to share this place—this paradise, he  scoffed to himself, maybe out loud—with other people?A Novel","brand":"Anchor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305234321637,"sku":"NP9781400034833","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400034833.jpg?v=1767738936","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-darwin-conspiracy-isbn-9781400034833","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}