"[This] modernized version provided by Daniel Duzdevich, a doctoral student of biology at Columbia University, doesn't meddle with Darwin's theories or basic exposition and so his edited Origin remains a weighty trek, but he has made the way a lot smoother."-- Foreword Reviews "Students have great difficulty understanding Darwin's Origin --as do many trained biologists. Daniel Duzdevich's modern rendition of the 1859 text is a most useful addition to the general understanding of this major revision in biology. He has presented a full account of Darwin's ideas in the original and in a form that makes them far more understandable to the reader who is not a specialist in evolutionary theory."--Walter Bock, Columbia University "There is a long tradition of 'translating' or retelling works in the humanities--Charles Lamb's prose versions of Shakespeare's plays and the multiple renderings of the Bible into modern English come immediately to mind. This book may be a first for a scientific work, where an attempt is made to translate a text almost line-by-line and preserve each point in the original. Duzdevich has done a nice job indeed. Even for those who have read the Origin many times, this retelling has the ability to change one's focus, so to speak, and in so doing reinvigorate elements of the original text.

"--James T. Costa, author of The Annotated Origin "The first thing I learned in college is that every generation needs its own translation of Homer's epics. I was taken aback, but soon saw the wisdom of that aphorism. A few years later, I struggled with Darwin's Victorian prose; the language barrier posed by the original Origin of Species added to my doubts that I could wrap my untutored mind around the great man's thoughts. Duzdevich's rendering of Darwin's epic into modern English is as meaningful a contribution as Lattimore's then-modern translation of the Iliad . May this 'translation' attract many more readers to Darwin's founding statement of evolution!"--Niles Eldredge, Curator Emeritus, The American Museum of Natural History and author of Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life.