Darwin is far more readable than any of the others you mention.
Possibly Mein Kampf could compete in short passages by a "reading difficulty" score, but it's really tedious and much longer (by a factor of 5!). Darwin could actually write. Origin of Species was intended for the educated public as well as for scientists.
No one reads Origin of Species either. I’ll bet that there’s a 100 to 1 ratio of people who have heard of Darwin’s book versus those who have read it. Same goes for many important (or at least influential) books. Mein Kampf, Das Capital and Newton’s Principia are a few more that come to mind.
I suppose I understand, but his science books (which all of them are, save for "God Delusion") are top notch. If you want to understand Evolution, there's no better writer on the topic.
Good article. If you want more, rather than reading Darwin, I suggest Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which gives a broader, more modern view of the importance of evolution. Especially of "variation and selection", the core ideas of Darwin, and without a lot of frequently irrelevant, for the general reader, biological details.
Not sure I disagree overall, but Darwin isn't a very good example. He produced quite a lot of writing throughout a long career, and his most famous book, On the Origin of Species, came somewhat late (he was 50, and it was something like his tenth or eleventh published book).
Dawkins [1] and Hitchens’ works on religion are pop-science/culture books, not serious academic studies. Virtually no scholars in philosophy, religious studies, etc. agree with the narratives they present.
Instead, I would read Taylor, Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution, and maybe Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality.
If you're reading Darwin as a biology textbook, you're blowing it from the start, though. It's much more valuable as a primary document in the history of biology. That and from what I understand, it's pretty interesting reading.
What a ponderous, pretentious load. This strikes me very much as a list of "Books I want everyone to know that I think everyone should read" which is very different from the stated title. Is Origin Of Species really a better choice than almost anything on the topic by Dawkins or Gould for the general purpose of "[learning] of our kinship with all other life on Earth"?
On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin. It's pretty dense, dry, and can require a bit of a commitment, but there's some pretty interesting bits and pieces in there aside from just proposing evolution.
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