Darwin's Orchestra is an oversize book of days, its 366 essays (one for every day of the year, including Leap Day) adding up to more than 500 pages of wonderful stories about King Kong, Rachel Carson, Spider-Man, John Muir, Basho, and countless other figures real and imagined. It includes more than 100 illustrations—movie stills, Far Side cartoons, bronze opium weights, ancient sculptures, Victorian drawings.

EXCERPTS FROM REVIEWS

"In this calendar of curios, the levity of oddity reigns supreme....With a satirical undertone, Sims also aims his eclectic attention at representations of science (chiefly animals extinct or extant) in popular culture. So he trolls for subjects among cartoons, children's books, campy monster movies, or journal entries by famous authors....One never knows what's on the next page—Columbus is as likely as Cleopatra or Calvin and Hobbes—making this a truly surprising, weird, and entertaining compendium."
—Gilbert Taylor, BOOKLIST

"The mini-essays in Darwin's Orchestra are a marvelously entertaining mix of evolutionary theory, biology, physical science, history, hoaxes, crank religion, and the liberal arts. Sims's range is awesome. Although the format is one essay for each day of the year, it is almost impossible not to keep turning pages to see what delightful surprises come next."
—Martin Gardner

"Throughout, the author chronicles the influences that flora and fauna, the earth, and stars have had on human culture. This is a book to be savored. Recommend for all libraries, including personal ones."
—Bruce D. Neville, LIBRARY JOURNAL

"To understand how we perceive the natural world, the interplay between science and popular culture is vital. Darwin's Orchestra is a treasure trove of odd, entertaining, quirky—and significant—episodes from the history of natural history."
—Richard Milner, senior editor of Natural History magazine, author of The Encyclopedia of Evolution

"In this hype-saturated age....it's rare to run into a science book that promises nothing but the rarest commodity of all—a good read....It's also quirky, nicely written, and full of gossipy tidbits....The blending of nature, science history, and the arts reaches its whimsical peak in the essay from which the book takes its title....As Vladimir Nabokov says in [one] essay, 'There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts.'"
—Phillip Manning, NEWS & OBSERVER (Raleigh)

"Michael Sims provides us with an offbeat, endlessly entertaining daybook celebrating humankind's multifaceted and curious interactions with Nature. Every one of the 366 entries holds new, fascinating, and often surprising bits of information, all of it rendered by an urbane, witty, and encyclopedic raconteur."
—Paul Mariani, poet and biographer