Saturday, October 24, 2009
Readathon: Hour 15: What Darwin Saw
What Darwin Saw: The Journey That Changed the World by Rosalyn Schanzer
I know, I know. It looks like a comic book. It sounds like a comic book.
It's not a comic book.
Or, at least, it's not your grandfather's comic book. So to speak.
What Darwin Saw is the story of Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, a trip that changed the way people saw the world. It looks like a comic book. It sounds like a comic book.
But this is no Superman here. The text enclosed in little speech balloons comes from primary sources, often. This is the textbook comic book. Or a comic book textbook. Something like that.
A sample: A view of the Amazon, with monkeys and parrots and frogs hanging from trees, alligators swimming close to Darwin's rowboat, and in the speech balloons coming from Darwin's mouth: "Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval forests, undefaced by the hand of man." Huh? I am imagining the reaction of a fifth grader.
The pictures tell the story, or help tell the story. All the complex ideas are made clearer with the pictures in this book.
The book concludes with an author's note explaining the making of the book and a bibliography.