Better than a Dog Anyhow: Stories of Darwin, by Stan Rice

Author Stan Rice has just published a set of short stories Better than a Dog Anyhow based on Charles Darwin. Rice wrote the Encyclopedia of Evolution and other popular books about evolution. He knows a lot of details about Darwin, and this collection of stories shows it.

Here is the Amazon description of the book: “The young Charles Darwin wants to believe in an orderly created world. But his experiences of the world—from the death of his mother, to the beautiful ravages of love, to the many exciting adventures during his trip around the world—disrupt this view. For Charles and Emma, his wife of four decades, religious faith has always been a point of quiet but loving contention. Five of these stories are fictionalized accounts of Darwin’s true biography. The others are imaginary stories: about Darwin’s Irish gardener who cannot understand why Darwin is so kind to him; a fantasy in which Darwin is reunited, via interlacing time lines, with his dead daughter Annie; and, what if Darwin, the father of evolution, had met Mendel, the father of genetics? In these stories, you will find a man whom you wish you could have known.”