I'm going to buy two books recommended by the Wall Street Journal, a book about Charles Darwin and a Christopher Hitchens book about George Orwell.

"Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist" by Adrian Desmond and James Moore (1991)

Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” (1859) appeared at a time when creationism impinged mightily on the discipline of biology. Darwin challenged this Christian-oriented belief by proposing a revolutionary explanation of the earth’s varied life forms, not only by emphasizing contingency, natural selection and the transfer of evolved traits, but by turning God into an absentee landlord. Reaction to the theory was brutal. Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s absorbing tale of Darwin’s daring—best exemplified perhaps in his assertion that humans shared a common ancestor with the great apes—often reads like a detective story. The book vividly renders Darwin’s complicated personal life, including his horrifying realization that inbreeding likely caused the deadly inherited diseases suffered by the children in his family. This book captures an era, a triumph and the interior world of the extraordinary Darwin.

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"Why Orwell Matters" by Christopher Hitchens (2002)

George Orwell spent his early adulthood serving as a police officer in Burma, fighting fascism in Spain and writing propaganda for England during World War II. His defining political and artistic legacy, however, is “1984,” a parable intended, as Christopher Hitchens puts it, to disturb “the complacency” of Western intellectuals who in the late 1940s had “a soft spot” for Stalin’s U.S.S.R. Hitchens’s book, a tribute to Orwell, is largely a collection of reflections on how Orwell is viewed today on the political left and right, in the U.S. and Britain. Engaging with Orwell’s hagiographers and his critics, Hitchens lucidly presents the contradictory legacy of this 20th-century political freethinker. He remains as ever a joy to read.