I don't know if I ever disclosed this, but...back before I knew I was doing Storm World, I was seriously contemplating writing a narrative account of the Dover evolution trial for my second book. Now, well, I'm kinda glad I didn't. You see, there are not one, not two, but three books in the hopper about the subject, the first of which is already out. They are: The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything: Evolution, Intelligent Design, and a School Board in Dover, PA, by Gordy Slack; 40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, Oxycontin, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania, by Matthew Chapman; and Monkey Girl: Education, Evolution, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul, by Edward Humes. This last one came out last month.
I don't know about you, but in my view, Matthew Chapman's book has by far the most interesting title. Plus I met him at the trial and found him a very nice guy. Plus, he's actually a real live Darwin descendent. Still, I wouldn't want to be in competition with two other seemingly interchangeable books, even if Chapman's seems most likely to stand out from the crowd. Monkey Girl's author apparently won a Pulitzer, but his book promises to tell the story "from the perspectives of all sides of the battle," which sounds to me like it might be too "balanced"....but in any event, I encourage you to check all of them out, and then write a 5,000 word essay comparing and contrasting. Actually, I bet the New York Review of Books has already assigned one...
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PZ Myers wrote a rather positive review of Monkey Girl
Chapman has a prior book, _Trials of the Monkey: An Accidental Memoir_, about the Scopes trial and his visit to Dayton, TN.
Chapman is a screenwriter ("Runaway Jury", "Consenting Adults", "Strangers Kiss", "What's the Worst That Could Happen?") and husband of Brazilian actress Denise Teixeira (daughter of Humberto Teixeira, co-author of "Asa Branca"), and ex-husband of Victoria Tennant (before Steve Martin married and divorced her).
You need to get busy on your next book, the expose of homeopathy entitled The Royal Family's War on Science.
Matthew Chapman wrote an interesting and entertaining article a year ago for Harpers. I'm glad to see that he expanded it into a book.
I just finished reading Monkey Girl. It's possible that my bias caused me to read more into it than was actually there, but I felt the author fairly clearly felt that the outcome of the trial was justified. Yes, the story was told from multiple perspectives, but I did not get a sense of false balance. Humes tried to present what he felt was the truth, based on his research, and not just an aggregation of each player's version of the truth.