To a certain extent it suffers from the Hamlet problem--it's full of clichés! Or what are now clichés, but which Darwin was the first to pen. Natural selection, variation, the struggle for existence, survival of the fittest: it's all in here.

Darwin's friend and "bulldog" T. H. Huxley said upon reading the Origin, "How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that." Alfred Russel Wallace had thought of the same theory of evolution Darwin did, but it was Darwin who gathered the mass of supporting evidence--on domestic animals and plants, on variability, on sexual selection, on dispersal--that swept most scientists before it. It's hardly necessary to mention that the book is still controversial: Darwin's remark in his conclusion that "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" is surely the pinnacle of British understatement. --Mary Ellen Curtin, Amazon.com
A book that changed the world.., 2010-03-05
This book is truly fantastic. I've studied and been researching into Darwin and the Theory of evolution for a long time now, and having read this book once before, I decided it was a must have on my bookshelf. I've just finished reading it, and Darwin's intelligence shines through by his literary genius, that whilst sometimes hard to follow due to the time period he's writing it in, is very concise and clear and shows a complete understanding of his theory and total confidence in his research and findings.

A must have for any person interested in this field, but is not so much for the average layperson.