Bøger af Matthew Chapman

The Paradocian Council is in ruins. The ancient, clandestine organization of time-traveling assassins responsible for creating a new future for humanity has fallen to a coup of defectors who seek to reshape the Universe Tree, led by a shadowy figure who has also seized the U.S. presidency. Trillions of lives across hundreds of worlds are in peril. And former Sen. Greg Crawley, the last hope, has been cast out into the unknown. Even if he can return to rally a resistance...what power does he have to make everything right again?

Freshly apprenticed after a drawn-out filibuster of his confirmation, former U.S. senator Greg Crawley has officially joined the Paradocian Council, the secret group responsible for creating every alternate time and existence. Yet the factions which sought to stop his nomination and bring down the Council from within are angrier than ever...and emboldened. The more Greg and his mentor fight to hold together the Council, the more everything seems to collapse. And meanwhile, all around the Universe Tree, odd, unexplained dangers keep appearing...

In this fascinating story of evolution, religion, politics, and personalities, Matthew Chapman captures the story behind the headlines in the debate over God and science in America.Kitzmiller v. Dover Board of Education, decided in late 2005, pitted the teaching of intelligent design (sometimes known as "creationism in a lab coat") against the teaching of evolution. Matthew Chapman, the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, spent several months covering the trial from beginning to end. Through his in-depth encounters with the participants--creationists, preachers, teachers, scientists on both sides of the issue, lawyers, theologians, the judge, and the eleven parents who resisted the fundamentalist proponents of intelligent design--Chapman tells a sometimes terrifying, often hilarious, and above all moving story of ordinary people doing battle in America over the place of religion and science in modern life.

"When Darwin called his second book The Descent of Man instead of The Ascent of Man he was thinking of his progeny." So declares Darwin's great-great grandson Matthew Chapman as he leaves behind his stressful career as a Hollywood screenwriter and travels to Dayton, Tennessee where in 1925 creationist opposition to the teaching of evolution in schools was played out in a famous legal drama, the Scopes Monkey Trial.The purpose of this journey is to see if opinions have changed in the seventy- five intervening years. A defiant atheist, Chapman is confronted not only by the fundamentalist beliefs that continue to banish the theory of evolution but by his own spiritual malaise as the outward journey becomes an inward quest, a tragicomic "accidental memoir"."First there was Charles Darwin, two yards long and nobody's fool. Then there was his son, my great-grandfather, Sir Francis Darwin, an eminent botanist. Then came my grandmother Frances, a modest poet who spent a considerable amount of time in rest-homes for depression From her issued my beloved mother, Clare, who was extremely short, failed to complete medical school, and eventually became an alcoholic. Then we get down to me. I'm in the movie business."Trials of the Monkey combines travel writing and reportage, as Chapman records his encounters in the South, with history and the accidental memoir of a man full of mid-life doubts in a genre-breaking first book that is darkly funny, provocative and poignant.

The Snail and the Ginger Beer tells the full story of the remarkable case of Donoghue v Stevenson which represents, perhaps, the greatest contribution made by English and Scottish lawyers to the development of the common law. It provides vivid biographical sketches of the protagonists and of the great lawyers who were involved in the case.