"Charles and Emma: The Darwin's Leap of Faith" by Deborah Heiligman

Once again, I was stymied by expectations.  I was prepared to like this book.  It won a ton of awards when it came out and anything about Charles Darwin has to be interesting, yes?  Well, maybe.  And maybe not.  The premise is good.  Charles Darwin's voyage revolutionized his entire belief system ... about nature, about God, about life.  But he waited 20 years to publish his theories.  In the meantime, he married a woman of deeply held Christian beliefs, had children, and wrestled with the discoveries he had made.  Because he wrote vociferously in his notebooks, and because it was a time of letters (oh, what will happen to the ephemeral records of the modern age?), the author is able to piece together a very complete picture of these 20 years -- of Darwin's fear of marriage and ultimate happiness with it, of the complexities that parenthood brought to Darwin's life in an age of high infant mortality.  The problem is -- it just doesn't go anywhere.  Each chapter, told in stiff prose mimicking the formality of the era, is simply a re-hash of journals and letters with supposition filling in any gaps.  It's not a story as much as a very detailed timeline.  There was absolutely no page-turning quotient for me and it dragged so much I had a difficult time finishing it.  The overly pedantic tone was also a turn-off in the initial chapters.  Yes, from a research perspective, it is strong -- hence the awards, I would guess.  But in the end, it wasn't engaging unless you are the kind of person fascinated by the kind of leather covering that was used on Darwin's journals (a bit of minutiae mentioned repeatedly).  And isn't that what we look for in a book, nonfiction or otherwise?  Something that moves us? For me, this just came off as a glorified set of encyclopedia entries.