The Charles Darwin book is called What Darwin
Saw: The Journey that Changed the World.
And so I'll talk about that one first, because
it's the most recent of the two.
And Charles Darwin, when he was a young guy
in his 20s — he started when he was 22 — he
took a five year voyage, all the way around
the world, and he was the naturalist on a
ship that was actually doing surveying and
a lot of other things, so the trip ended up
taking much longer than they thought.
And Darwin was wonderful because he was at
an age that kids would really relate to him.
He was a good looking guy, very athletic at
the time, and he would go anywhere and do
anything.
He did get seasick on the boat, but other
than that he was just fine and I loved him
because he wrote a series of journals, or
he wrote a journal basically about the entire
trip and told what he did every day.
And so as I went through that journal, which
is fascinating, I kind of focused on the science
part of it.
He had a lot of adventures along the way.
But I focused on the science because I wanted
to know what it was that influenced him and
made him even think about evolution in the
first place.
And if you read the book there are clues,
big clues, huge clues on every page as to
what he saw that let you know how he came
up with that theory of evolution.
And then, he didn't even think about it specifically
during the trip, but when he came back he
put everything together and he went aha, and
so the aha moments in the science experiments
that he did and all the things that he had
learned are shown visibly in the book and
he and I narrate his story.
So he tells his part of it through quotes,
exact quotes from his letters and journals
and books that he wrote, and sometimes he
wrote updated versions of his books as he
went along and got more sophisticated with
what he did.
And the thing that made that fun is because
he's so likeable, he has such a good sense
of humor and you can hear his British accent
even when you're reading what he wrote.
And he's just enormously readable, so readable
that everything that he wrote is still in
print and has never been out of print to this
day.
His books were best sellers during their time,
even though he was terrified that his theory
was going to turn everybody off because people
had such a literal idea about the Bible at
the time and he was terrified that everybody
would just hate him.
And some people still give him trouble.
