The National Anthem Book

What a charming book! The illustrations by Mary Azarian are beautiful, the prose is simple and clear, and I LOVED the snippets from original sources (Darwin's diaries, notes, letters, books). It had so many interesting details about his childhood, his love of experimenting and collecting, his thought processes, his theories that he kept secret, his critics, his friends and family. I loved that it shared his view that he "saw the universe as too amazing not to have been created by a God," and that "more and more people...have found that their religious beliefs and Darwin's discoveries can exist side by side." It makes me want to read The Origin of the Species.