You just really so have to read this book

Anybody who knows me will know that I periodically get completely obsessed by a new book, buy it for as many people as I can afford to, talk about it incessantly and so on. These are rarely books that somebody has passed to me and said, "Hey, why don't you read this?" More normally, they are serendipitious choices.

Well, the latest candidate is By Design or By Chance, by Denyse O'Leary. It can be found on Amazon here. It is an introduction to the evolutionism/creationism/intelligent design debate, written by a journalist from an arts background, who therefore had to do lots of research to understand the issues involved. She is a Christian, but her church didn't expect any particular view regarding origins, so she wasn't starting with a strong commitment to any particular position.

The book is written in a very accessible style, with sidebars to explain key points and other issues, lots of notes and web references. One of the things that I particularly like about it is that it has sought to detach itself from a lot of the more intense positions, on all sides, to present "just the facts" - although the writer is happy to give her concluding opinions at the end.