For more relevant books from The Calvin Bookshelf, see anthropology, biology, cognitive sciences, ethology, climate, evolution, brains, language.

National Academy of Sciences report on the Teaching of Evolution is available on the web as well as in print from the National Academy Press. amazon.com

Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (Knopf, 1995; Princeton UP pb 1996).

The best of the Darwin biographies (volume 1).
amazon.com paperback

Helena Cronin, The Ant and the Peacock (Cambridge University Press 1992).

"Imagine a world without Darwin. Imagine a world in which Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace had not transformed our understanding of living things. What... would become baffling and puzzling..., in urgent need of explanation? The answer is: practically everything about living things...."
UBS amazon.com Powell's

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London 1859).

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."
amazon.com -- try to get the Penguin or the Harvard University Press facsimile of the first edition (the others tend to be the sixth, which is cluttered with replies to contemporary critics).

Charles Darwin (edited by Paul Ekman), The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals 3rd Edition (Oxford Univ Prress, 1998 reprint).

Yes, ethology is another field that Charles Darwin helped to invent. Among the most readable of his books, it's alive with anecdotes, literary quotations and his own observations of his friends and children. Darwin spent a lot of time seeking out photographs of facial expressions to include in this book, and Paul Ekman (the modern expert on facial expression of emotion) makes a wonderful editor. amazon.com

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London 1871).

"Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system- with all these exalted powers- Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."
UBS amazon.com Powell's

Michael White, John R. Gribbin, Darwin: A Life in Science (E P Dutton, 1995).

An intellectual history of evolutionary thought, and a fine short version of Darwin's life and times; a different viewpoint than the other fine bio's of Darwin, such as Janet Browne's.
amazon.com

All those other books by and about Charles Darwin.