One third concise, accessible potted biography of Charles Darwin, two-thirds essays offering new, if odd, pathways to contextualizing Darwin's famous Theory of Evolution by means of natural selection. It's enjoyably presented, contains enough illustrative figures to give the reader a sense of what they're reading about, and makes its science plain.

I really don't get the inclusion of quotes from kidlit. It's not always apt, at least it wasn't so to me, but it really didn't ever detract from my reading of Dr. Ault's stories. If you, like I did, think this book is aimed at younger audiences, get that misconception out of your head now. Maybe a high-school senior at the youngest, more likely a not-very-science-oriented twentysomething is at the sweet spot. The older reader whose science education is behind the curve will get a lot out of the read because it's packed with reasonably current science. Really good analogies and examples bring meaning to often abstract concepts. The vocabulary pulls no punches, so have your preferred reference source handy. There are endnotes aplenty, and the index actually functioned as an index...it was, after all, published by a university press. All of this, on top of the popular-science tone of the author's presentation, gave me a very enjoyable reading experience.
<I>This review was written in 2017 and posted to my Science, Dinosaurs, & Environmental Issues tab. I've moved it to facilitate my indexing project.</i>

Had to DNF as did not really enjoy this book. Struggled with the writing style.