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So declares Darwin's great-great grandson Matthew Chapman as he leaves behind his stressful career as a Hollywood screenwriter and travels to Dayton, Tennessee where in 1925 creationist opposition to the teaching of evolution in schools was played out in a famous legal drama, the Scopes Trial.
The purpose of this journey is to see if opinions have changed in the seventy- five intervening years. A defiant atheist, Chapman is confronted not only by the fundamentalist beliefs that continue to banish the theory of evolution but by his own spiritual malaise, as the outward journey becomes an inward quest, a tragicomic "accidental memoir".
"First there was Charles Darwin, two yards long and nobody's fool. Then there was his son, my great-grandfather, Sir Francis Darwin, an eminent botanist. Then came my grandmother Frances, a modest poet who spent a considerable amount of time in rest-homes for depression From her issued my beloved mother, Clare, who was extremely short, failed to complete medical school, and eventually became an alcoholic. Then we get down to me. I'm in the movie business."
The purpose of this journey is to see if opinions have changed in the seventy- five intervening years. A defiant atheist, Chapman is confronted not only by the fundamentalist beliefs that continue to banish the theory of evolution but by his own spiritual malaise, as the outward journey becomes an inward quest, a tragicomic "accidental memoir".
"First there was Charles Darwin, two yards long and nobody's fool. Then there was his son, my great-grandfather, Sir Francis Darwin, an eminent botanist. Then came my grandmother Frances, a modest poet who spent a considerable amount of time in rest-homes for depression From her issued my beloved mother, Clare, who was extremely short, failed to complete medical school, and eventually became an alcoholic. Then we get down to me. I'm in the movie business."
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Reviews
"Funny, irreverent, profound, moving, instructive, and entertaining. How I wish that I had written this book."
Peter Coyote, author of Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle
"Hugely entertaining...While Chapman can be as funny and revealing as either [Bill Bryson or Paul Theroux] in the travel sections of his book, the autobiographical element plumbs greater depths."
Tony Gould, The Spectator
"This book is not just a sneer at freak-show America. Chapman is too aware of his own foibles and failures to curl his lip . . . Hilarious . . . uncomfortable . . . it's also life-affirming, even if life as lived by Chapman is often damnably itchy."
Nigel Richardson, The Daily Telegraph