LOOKING FOR DARWIN
Lloyd Spencer Davis
Longacre Press $40
Lloyd Spencer Davis can be fairly called a writer of creative non-fiction. He could become New Zealand’s own Bill Bryson if Looking for Darwin is anything to go by.
He has spoken twice in Auckland in the past week or so. First at the 2007 CLL Writers’ Awards where he was the guest speaker and again this evening at the launch of Looking for Darwin held in the Atrium of the Auckland War Memorial Museum. One could not help but be impressed by his entertaining and engaging addresses.
Lloyd Spencer Davis
Longacre Press $40
Lloyd Spencer Davis can be fairly called a writer of creative non-fiction. He could become New Zealand’s own Bill Bryson if Looking for Darwin is anything to go by.
He has spoken twice in Auckland in the past week or so. First at the 2007 CLL Writers’ Awards where he was the guest speaker and again this evening at the launch of Looking for Darwin held in the Atrium of the Auckland War Memorial Museum. One could not help but be impressed by his entertaining and engaging addresses.
He is articulate and funny, informed and irreverent and his audiences were charmed, not the least Bookman Beattie who many, many years ago had coached Davis in debating and public speaking when Davis was a highly promising student at Napier Boys High School and Beattie was a young bookseller in that fair city.
In Looking for Darwin Davis sets “on a quest for insight and meaning in a world that still pitches theories of evolution against belief in a Creator; the science of natural selection against a faith that asserts our world was crafted by Intelligent Design”.
Don’t be put off however by this description because the book is one of the funniest and most entertaining non-fiction titles I’ve read in a long while.
It is largely a travel book, and a memoir with a biography of Charles Darwin thrown in for good measure. Davis not only visits the places Darwin visited on his marathon 19th century five year journey around the globe on the Beagle but he goes to many other places as well including Canada, Disneyland, Antarctica, New Zealand’s Routeburn Track, India, Venice, Los Angeles, Charleston, Rome and Edinburgh. It is an unforgettable tour.
Dr. Lloyd Davis is best known as a zoologist, a world authority on penguins, an academic administrator, and a natural history filmmaker with numerous academic publications to his name but I suggest with the publication of Looking for Darwin he could become a very significant populariser of the scientific world; I see him as a cross between Bill Bryson and David Attenborough.
Congratulations to both author and publisher for a unique book.
In Looking for Darwin Davis sets “on a quest for insight and meaning in a world that still pitches theories of evolution against belief in a Creator; the science of natural selection against a faith that asserts our world was crafted by Intelligent Design”.
Don’t be put off however by this description because the book is one of the funniest and most entertaining non-fiction titles I’ve read in a long while.
It is largely a travel book, and a memoir with a biography of Charles Darwin thrown in for good measure. Davis not only visits the places Darwin visited on his marathon 19th century five year journey around the globe on the Beagle but he goes to many other places as well including Canada, Disneyland, Antarctica, New Zealand’s Routeburn Track, India, Venice, Los Angeles, Charleston, Rome and Edinburgh. It is an unforgettable tour.
Dr. Lloyd Davis is best known as a zoologist, a world authority on penguins, an academic administrator, and a natural history filmmaker with numerous academic publications to his name but I suggest with the publication of Looking for Darwin he could become a very significant populariser of the scientific world; I see him as a cross between Bill Bryson and David Attenborough.
Congratulations to both author and publisher for a unique book.
Footnote:
Great launch event at the Auckland War Memorial Museum with Barbara Larson introducing Ruud (the Bugman) Kleinpaste who entertained us with an amusing & thoughtful address in which he claimed he was an especially slow reader, "I read slower than the Continental Drift", before launching "Looking for Darwin".
The author followed and was clearly moved by the unexpected attendance of his mother and two brothers. A wonderful warm Sunday evenbing event and such an appropriate venue with the Charles Darwin Exhibition currently showing.
Photos below taken at launch & they include:
Publisher Barbara Larson of Longacres Press with Ruud Kleinpaste.Bookman Beattie with author
Author, launcher & publisher
Kevin Ireland buying a copy from the author.
Kevin Ireland buying a copy from the author.
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