On the seas

Darwin's five-year voyage on HMS Beagle was spent documenting nature across the Southern Hemisphere. His full notes are now compiled in Charles Darwin's Notebooks From the Voyage of the Beagle by historian John van Wyhe with Gordon Chancellor and Kees Rookmaaker (Cambridge Univ. Press). In Charles Darwin: The Beagle Letters, edited by Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge Univ. Press), Darwin's correspondence charts his changing ideas and everyday seafaring experiences. Alan Gibbons offers young readers a cabin boy's perspective in Charles Darwin (Kingfisher). And in The Voyage of the Beagle: Darwin's Extraordinary Adventure Aboard Fitzroy's Famous Survey Ship (US Naval Institute Press), James Taylor collates the ship's plans, biographies of Darwin and Captain Robert Fitzroy, photographs, artefacts and journal extracts from the voyage.

On evolution

In Charles Darwin: The Concise Story of an Extraordinary Man (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press), Tim Berra describes Darwin's revolutionary scientific work, its effect on modern biology and the influence of evolutionary theory on Western thought. The Rough Guide to Evolution by Mark Pallen (Rough Guides) provides a popular summary, including the cultural impact of Darwin on music, plays and novels, and a list of Darwin bicentenary events.

Charles Darwin's Shorter Publications 1829–1883 by John van Wyhe (Cambridge Univ. Press) includes Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection and more than 70 newly discovered items. The Cambridge Companion to the 'Origin of Species', edited by Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards (Cambridge Univ. Press), draws on expert opinion to provide the religious, social, literary and philosophical contexts in which the Origin was composed.

On the man

In their controversial forthcoming biography, Darwin's Sacred Cause (Allen Lane), Adrian Desmond and James Moore will argue that Darwin's hatred of slavery fuelled his search for a theory of human origins. After examining his manuscripts and letters, they conclude that this disgust empowered the conservative man to come up with theories that were seen as radical by his contemporaries.

Darwin's morality was also influenced by his wife's religious beliefs, according to Deborah Heiligman in her biography aimed at younger readers, Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith (Henry Holt). His own poor health may also have coloured his thoughts, says Ralph Colp in Darwin's Illness (Univ. Press Florida).

Or he was plain lucky, according to Patrick H. Armstrong. Darwin's Luck: Chance and Fortune in the Life and Work of Charles Darwin (Hambledon Continuum) asks to what extent Darwin took the wrong scientific paths, even if he eventually came to the right conclusions.

Darwin's exploration closer to home is the subject of Darwin's Island (Little, Brown). Biologist Steve Jones visits the British landscapes that influenced 'the sage of Kent' as much as the Galapagos Islands, and brings his work up to date. Michael Boulter's book, Darwin's Garden (Constable & Robinson), describes Darwin's relationship with his own garden and the experiments he carried out in his greenhouse, explains Beverley Glover in her review (see Nature 454, 944–945; 2008).

Darwin shares his birthday celebrations with Abraham Lincoln. In Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life (Random House), Adam Gopnik sees both as thinkers who made and experienced great changes in society. They saw the shift away from faith and fear to the embrace of reason, argument and observation not merely as intellectual ideals, but as a way of life.