Ricci Goes from Jesus to Darwin via Montréal

The Globe and Mail's James Adams offers readers the best piece on Nino Ricci I've read, right across . . . er, ad Mare usque ad Mare usque ad Mare :).

The crater held a circle of stars above them as if they were closed up in a snow globe, a private cosmos. He thought of Darwin sleeping out on the pampas during his Beagle trip, a middle-class white kid traveling the world, the first of the backpackers. It was only afterwards, really, that he had made any sense of what he had seen. Alex wondered what, in the fullness of time, he himself would make sense of, what small, crucial detail might be lodging itself in his brain that would shake his life to its foundations.
— Nino Ricci, The Origin of Species, p. 286.