Kathryn Lasky, Author of One Beetle Too Many: The Extraordinary Adventures of Charles Darwin

June 2, 2009

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! Today is a stormy day in New York, there’s thunder and lightening all around. It’s a great day for being on the radio. I have four guests on the show today, three authors and one musician, as always. At the end of the show will be musician Janet Paschal, and she’s got a new album out called Treasure. Before that I’ve got three authors, I’ve got Mark David Gerson, and he’s got a book that’s in the fantasy fiction category, and I’d love to talk to him about that. Mark Updegrove is a former Newsweek editor, and I’ll be talking with him about Baptism by Fire: Eight Presidents Who Took Office in Times of Crisis, and of course that applies today. And my first guest on the show is Kathryn Lasky, and she’s a children’s author. And without further ado, I’d love to chat with her, she’s on the line right now. Welcome to the show, Kathryn.

Kathryn Lasky: Oh, thank you. Happy to be on the line!

Dr. Kent: You’re the author of One Beetle Too Many. Tell us about this book.

Kathryn Lasky: Well, the full title is One Beetle Too Many: The Extraordinary Adventures of Charles Darwin. So it’s basically what we call, in the children’s publishing world, a picture biography, which means it’s illustrated, and it’s 48 pages. But it looks like a big picture book. It is about the life of Charles Darwin.

Dr. Kent: Just to get the fun stuff out of the way, first of all, are you running into anybody saying, “How could you do a biography of Charles Darwin?”

Kathryn Lasky: No, everybody’s saying, “That’s a good idea! It’s the anniversary of his birthday, 300 years.

Dr. Kent: That’s wonderful. I think there’s so much talk in the media about creationism versus all of that stuff. It’s neat to get to know Charles Darwin for what he really was, which is pretty extraordinary. Now tell us about Mr. Darwin.

Kathryn Lasky: Well, I decided to especially focus on the aspects of him, his personality, and his career that I thought would really appeal to children. So first let’s begin with the title, One Beetle Too Many. When Charles Darwin was a young boy, he wasn’t a very good student, actually. But he did love observing nature, and going out and collecting things, like beetles. One expedition, this is just in the countryside around his home in England, he found one, he loved beetles, and he found one that was gorgeous. And he had it in his left hand, and it was even more beautiful, and he had it in his right hand. And then he saw a third, and he didn’t have a third hand. So he popped the one from his right hand into his mouth and held it there, and then got the third one and went running home to put them in jars. So that’s the title, and it’s sort of very indicative of his personality, and his enthusiasm. He did try a few careers, but he did not succeed, well, studying for a few careers. He studied to be a doctor, and couldn’t stand the sight of blood. His father thought well, he should be a clergyman, but he didn’t like that much, but he was a fantastic observer of nature, and then he got his big break, which was to go as the naturalist on The Voyage of the Beagle.

Dr. Kent: How cool is that. Now, have you held two beetles in hand, and one in your mouth, just as part of your research?

Kathryn Lasky: No, I don’t think I have to go quite that far. I didn’t feel compelled. (laughter) But I did do a lot of research.

Dr. Kent: And what is, with a character like Charles Darwin, what was it about these creatures? I remember as a boy picking up a turtle and being so amazed, or catching my first firefly ad being so amazed at this little creature. What was that that Darwin felt inside, and how do you transfer that into a children’s book?

Kathryn Lasky: Well I think he was such a good observer, and he just started to feel, wonder how things are connected on earth. Somebody said recently, and I can’t remember the guy’s name, but he’s an evolutionary biologist from the University of Florida, and he said 99% of what we know today Charles Darwin didn’t know. But the 1% that he did know was really good. Darwin had this capacity to kind of glance over, peek over the horizon and start to wonder about these connections, and wonder about time and change. So my challenge in the book was, how do you explain evolution to young readers? So I tried to do it in kind of almost a visual and metaphoric way. And I just kept my thoughts trained on three basic things: the notion of continuing change, the pressures that can bring about that change in living organisms, and the scale of time. And you have to realize that when Darwin was born, people only thought the earth was something like, I don’t know, 6,000 years old. At the time he reached maturity, they were thinking in terms of millions of years. Somewhere when he was in his 30’s or so, they were thinking in hundreds of thousands of years. It’s only been in the 1920’s, maybe, that we started thinking in terms of billions of years. So you just kind of, I tried to capture the moments in his travels, in his observations, I guess you’d call those eureka moments, and how he wove all this stuff together.

Dr. Kent: Yeah, and he’s such a fascinating character from so many perspectives. So what made you start to think about writing this book? You’ve done a lot of things, and what made you write this one?

Kathryn Lasky: Well, first of all I have to tell you this story. It took Darwin 20 years to write Origin of Species. It took me 24 years to write this book. I started this book years ago. I wrote, obviously, many in between. But I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, very close to Harvard College, and when my daughter was about two I thought, “I’ve just got to get out of the house, I’m being driven crazy with diapers, and little kids running around.” So I hired a babysitter and what I did was, I walked over to Harvard. It was only about a five minute walk from my house to the Science Center Lecture Hall, and I sat in and I audited the course of Stephen Jay Gould, who was the great evolutionary biologist. So that’s how it began. And I started just educating myself. From that course I went on and I audited another one that David Taube gave, who’s a paleoanthropologist on human evolution. So I just started putting all this together. I just think, I know some people look at the stars and they wonder about the origins of the universe, they’re looking out into space. And I just started looking right on earth. As a matter of fact, that was the name of the Stephen Jay Gould course, it was called Life on Earth. So that’s when I started, but it was a bumpy road to getting the book out, that’s all I can say. I won’t even bore you with the details. But I’m very pleased. I just want to say, the illustrations, which I did not do, but the wonderful Matthew Trueman did, are just fabulous. I mean, they’re just beyond belief, and the critics have just raved about these illustrations. He just went and broke new ground with the illustrations as a medium.

Dr. Kent: The most fun thing about being a children’s author is that you get some wonderful illustrations in all your books, right?

Kathryn Lasky: Yeah, you do. And this is certainly among the finest that I’ve ever had, and I’ve done a lot of picture books for kids.

Dr. Kent: This book is called One Beetle Too Many: The Extraordinary Adventures of Charles Darwin. Have you had a chance to read this for kids?

Kathryn Lasky: I’ve read parts of it for kids, but I’ve been really pretty busy. So I haven’t sat down and read it with a group of kids yet. All my kids are grown up and out of the house. But I have a granddaughter now, but she’s just 8 months old, so she might be a little too young.

Dr. Kent: You’ll have to wait a couple years to bring your whole shelf of books over. So tell us about your career a little bit, where you’ve come from and where you plan to go with what you’re writing now.

Kathryn Lasky: I am one of these children’s book authors who does a lot of different things, a lot of different genres. Perhaps, like I did a lot of historical fiction, but perhaps right now my most popular books are a series called the Guardians of Ga’Hoole, which is a middle grade fantasy series, no humans in it, and only owls and other animals. And it’s being made into a movie. And actually the director of the movie is Zack Snyder, who just did The Watchmen. So that is being made, as we speak. That fantasy series of owl books, Guardians of Ga’Hoole, has been enormously popular amongst kids. I’m starting up another series, another two series. I’m also doing a non-fiction book about spiders, and I call her Spider Woman, but she’s an arachnologist, and a professor of Biology at Lewis and Clark University. My husband, with the non-fiction books, he’s a former National Geographic Photographer, but he illustrates a lot of the non-fiction with photographs. So we are just back from following Greta Binford, the arachnologist, around in the Dominican Republic.

Dr. Kent: Did you have to actually get in touch with some spiders?

Kathryn Lasky: Yeah. Up close and personal with spiders, with tarantulas and the (inaudible) spiders, which their more common name is brown recluse, but there’s a lot of different kinds of brown recluse, so these were the ones in the Caribbean.

Dr. Kent: You are a brave human being.

Kathryn Lasky: I thought I was going to be scared. I really wasn’t that scared at all. What scared me more was driving on the roads in the Dominican Republic. I realized there was a lot better chance that I was going to get killed on a road than bitten by a spider.

Dr. Kent: I think it’s the same thing in New York here.

Kathryn Lasky: Yeah, so anyhow, that’s what I do.

Dr. Kent: It’s been such a pleasure speaking with the author of One Beetle Too Many: The Extraordinary Adventures of Charles Darwin. It’s written by Kathryn Lasky and illustrated by Matthew Trueman. Or True-man? How does he say it?

Kathryn Lasky: Trueman. Not spelled like Harry Truman, but pronounced the same way.

Dr. Kent: Well, and he has truly beautiful artwork in this book, there’s no question. What a neat topic to have for a kid’s book, and thank you so much for chatting with me about it. Hopefully we talk to you again sometime.

Kathryn Lasky: Oh, thank you. Have a nice day.

Dr. Kent: You, too. My next guest on the show is the author of Baptism by Fire: Eight Presidents Who Took Office In Times of Crisis. Come on back in one second, and we’ll chat with him.

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