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    The Explanation for Everything
    The Explanation for Everything
    The Explanation for Everything
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Explanation for Everything

    Written by Lauren Grodstein

    Narrated by Rick Adamson

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Biology professor Andy Waite is finally beginning to pick up the pieces years after a drunk driver killed his wife. Between finishing his research and taking care of his young daughters, he has reasons to get through the day, and most days he does without falling apart. That is, until a young female student enters his life and turns it upside down.Melissa Potter is a passionate evangelist hoping to write the definitive paper about Creationism. She makes Andy#8217;s Darwinian certainty-and his grief-a personal challenge. As she chips away at his committed atheism, he begins to realize the emptiness that he#8217;s been living with for too long. But when the relationship turns romantic, the boundaries he#8217;s worked so hard to maintain-personally and professionally-start to blur, and soon it#8217;s unclear what kind of deliverance he really needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateSep 3, 2013
    ISBN9781622312528
    The Explanation for Everything
    Author

    Lauren Grodstein

    Lauren Grodstein is the author of the collection The Best of Animals and a novel, Reproduction Is the Flaw of Love, which was both a Breakout Book selection for Amazon.com and a Borders Original Voices pick. Her work has been translated into German, Italian and French. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University in Camden.

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    Reviews for The Explanation for Everything

    3/5

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    • 2/5
      DNF. I wanted to like this book, but just couldn't. The characters were frustrating and I couldn't connect with them. As for any explanation about anything - where was it? This book fell flat for me.
    • 4/5
      A tale of the struggle between science (logical thought/ideas/mind) and religious faith (emtions/heart/soul).Professor Andy Waite believes that Darwinism is the explanation for all the mysteries of existence. As an evolutionary biologist he has based his life and career around the concept. Yet as neat, tidy and scientific as the concept is, it does not help to him as he attempts to come to grips the with untimely and tragic death of his wife. In a life that is in all aspects uneventful - teaching disengaged students, working on research that runs maddeningly counter to what he expects, and trying to balance a personal life while raising two daughters - Waite plods on like the ethical person he imagines himself to be. That is until Melissa Potter enters his life. Potter wants to do independent research on Intelligent Design and considers Waite to be the perfect candidate to act as her advisor. When Waite agrees to this, Potter begins to methodically dismantle Waite's belief system and life in a way that is akind to Chinese water torture. To complicate things further, Waite receives news that his mentor, Henry Rosenblum, has died. Rosenblum has left Waite the legacy of a confession regarding a scandal that all but ended Rosenblum's career; a scandal that also involved a struggle between faith and science that resulted in the death of a young woman. Rosenblum's confession and Waite's personal life collide to put into question whether Darwinism - or anything for that matter - can be the explanation for everything.The philosophical debate between religion and science is a topic I find very interesting and author Lauren Grodstein has an interesting take on it. She exploited the chinks in the armor of belief on either side with interesting characters and a good story line. I found the writing of Rosenblum's explanation of what Darwin's theory meant to him to be particularly inspired.I enjoyed the book very much until the end when it seemed that the author either lost interest in the characters or the plot - the ending just fizzled. Still, even with the ending, I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in this topic.
    • 3/5
      The book is well written but I really struggle with the premise. It is the tale of a college teacher who specializes in teaching a class that exalts evolution at the expense of religion. A creationist student asks him if he might mentor her with regard to her thesis paper on creationism. Fine. He says yes. It is his amazingly quick change of heart after all his years of training and teaching that boggles the imagination. I can not buy that it would happen so quickly with so little push back on his part. What a poor teacher.
    • 2/5
      This is one of these books for which I have real mixed feelings - and not for what some might think is the obvious reason (science versus faith). Rather, this is a quite well written book if one focuses only on the words, but as per the characters, I found pretty much all of them completely unbelievable and unconvincing. Almost each one is a trivial, one-dimensional representation of either belief or doubt, which almost renders the entire point of the novel flippant. If it weren't for the strength of the writing, I would have discarded the novel.I'd be interested to read more from the author, but I think she'd do better sticking to lighter, less penetrative topics until she can give more depth and credibility to her characters.
    • 4/5
      The problem with reading great fiction is that when an average novel comes along, it seems lacking. One thinks how the themes could have been so much deeper or the characterizations could have been much more fascinating... So it goes for me with "The Explanation for Everything", a new novel by Lauren Grodstein.This is certainly an easy read for a book about heavy topics like evolution, religion, grief, and the meaning of life. The writing is very competent and there are good moments in this story of a academic widower and his students who help him to rethink his entire belief system. But I found myself hoping for more depth as the pages turned and it just didn't pan out. In my opinion, the most interesting person in the story was the dead wife; too bad she was only on the periphery and not at the center of the novel. If you like biology and believe that a grieving evolutionary biologist could see and talk to a ghost, this might be a story to check out. A 'philosophy lite' read.
    • 2/5
      The story of a man whose wife dies in an automobile accident and he has to raise his two daughters. He is a professor at a local college and teaches a class on evolution even though some of his students dismiss this theory. He dates the next door neighbor and has a relationship with one of his students and it is all just a little too slow.The book didn't really answer the explanation for everything to me. I just couldn't follow the book about half way through and lost interest.
    • 3/5
      The first part of the book I found myself thinking it was a pleasant enough tale. Simple, but pleasant. The second half of the book I began to be pretty bothered by the change of faith the main character was (seemingly) going through. It seemed very simplistic and unsubstantiated. The end of the book redeemed itself a bit in that it left the character in a complicated, non-decided, state which I find to be more realistic than a clear-cut conversation would have been.The book had the opportunity to delve deeper. To search through the real issues someone in that position would struggle with. Some, perhaps, might say that it did, but it felt very glossed over for me. I would have liked it to be less superficial.
    • 4/5
      I have been a huge fan of Lauren Grodstein's smooth, confident, intelligent prose for awhile now. I really enjoyed A Friend of the Family and Reproduction is the Flaw of Love. In her new novel, Grodstein has broadened the scope of her fiction exponentially and created a whole community of living, breathing characters around her protagonist, Andy Waite. A middle aged widower and college professor of biology, Andy is still grieving the loss of his wife while he suffers mid-career doldrums at a small college in New Jersey. Melissa Potter enters his life, a student who wants him to work with her on an independent study on intelligent design, challenging the Darwinian theories that Andy has taught for years, in a provocative and challenging manner, in a course nicknamed There is no God.I had expectations for how this story would play out, and Grodstein surprised me at every turn. The relationship that plays out between Andy and Melissa -- and Melissa herself, for that matter -- will not be what you expect. Grodstein does not create or write about stereotypes or caricatures. She examines, with careful and respectful detail, the intelligent, multi-varied characters that she creates. I wrote in another review, of Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings, that Wolitzer takes seriously our contemporary lives and what preoccupies us. I would say the same of Grodstein -- she examines parenthood, grief, work, friendship, and questions of morality and belief. It is wonderful to encounter novelists who are willing to do that, to take our middle class lives, here in America, now, so seriously. And it's a great read, with characters you care about. I am not sure the open-ended conclusion will satisfy everyone, and passionate believers and their counterparts, passionate atheists, may feel Grodstein danced a careful dance between their two positions. But I happen to believe that true belief must encompass all kinds of despair and doubt and felt Grodstein handled this debate with humanity, respect, and intelligence.Highly recommended.I also want to note that my Early Reviewers copy never arrived, and that I wrote to Algonquin Books about this. They wrote back immediately and sent me a copy. Thank you so much!!
    • 2/5
      I won this book from the early reviewers giveaway from LibraryThing. I was very excited to read it and couldn't wait until I finally had the chance to crack open this badboy. And maybe it was due to the anticipation, the wonderful things I had heard about Lauren Grodstein's writing or my own personal fascination with religion and science, but this book left a lot to be desired. Much of the plot felt strained and pushed and some of the writing seemed disjointed. To be fair, I did read this while studying for exams and that may have coloured my judgement and I may give it another try in the future, but I was disappointed with the first reading.
    • 5/5
      Professor Andy Waite teaches at a small college in New Jersey. His favorite course to teach is called There is No God. Even though not that many students attend his course, he enjoys the debate especially with Lionel; a Christian student who takes his class every year just to prove the existence of God. Andy is never swayed because he was taught evolution and Darwinism by one of the best: renowned Princeton Professor Hank Rosenblum. Hank is a brilliant author/celebrity who is also a self-righteous egotistic, where as Andy; a father of two girls, hiding away after the tragic death of his wife killed by a drunk driver; is more mindful, keeping to himself and only interacting with people when his job or girls demand his attention. Science is his religion and he gets meaning from studying the brains of lab rats whom he doses with alcohol in an attempt to discover if there is a genetic component to alcoholism. Things in his life are moving right along and then he meets Melissa Potter, an acquaintance of Lionel’s, who wants Andy to oversee her Independent Study into the origin of life, so that she can prove Intelligent Design. Against his better judgment, he agrees and his life is turned upside down.Great book, I found myself thinking that the author was slanted towards one way and then she turned it around and had me questioning if that was a correct judgment. I personally believe in intelligent design and that things didn’t just happen. Darwinism has too many holes and yet colleges continue to teach it as fact. I would recommend this book to parents and students on their way to college. Love the imperfect relationships between the characters, the only thing that didn’t ring true was how Melissa acted in her relationship with Andy: without giving it away, too many boundaries were pushed and her response at the end seemed like she stepped out of character. I’m giving The Explanation of Everything 5 stars with a warning because of some adult content.
    • 3/5
      This author is a good storyteller, and for the most part the book is well written. Andy is an evolutionary biologist and professor, teaching a course titled "There is No God". While teaching this course Andy agrees to become the academic advisor for a young woman who is working on an individual study to attempt to prove "intelligent design". Andy overlooks his objections to this as a research project, as there is no scientific proof for this theory. Melissa, the student, asks Andy to read some of her own books that support her theory. This is where the book lost it's momentum for me, as the author does not use any of the real and compelling arguments to support a belief in God. Instead, the book that Andy chooses to read, and that supposedly shakes his previous strongly held belief system, seemed like just a rambling text about the authors and what God has done in their lives. There is no attempt by Andy to mesh what he knows as a scientist with what he is reading, and no real meat given to anything that might truly be convincing. The author does make Andy a likeable person, one who is trying to deal with grief over the death of his wife, while raising his two young daughters on his own. The concept of a scientist struggling with previously held strong atheism, and a desire to believe in something more, is an intriguing idea for a novel. And the story is good, but this could have been a book with much more depth if the author had fleshed out the things that challenge Andy's atheism, and given more credence to how other beliefs could be equally as convincing.I received this book from LibraryThing.
    • 4/5
      The premise of this one enticed me -- a college professor specializing in evolutionary biology agrees to advise a religiously devout student with her intelligent design research. I'm drawn to any novel trying to tackle such an enormous conflict. Grodstein doesn't have the subtlety or depth of Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh wrestling with similar issues, but she gets her ideas across and without being pedantic and tells an engaging story along the way.
    • 4/5
      Fast-paced, interesting novel that isn't really about the divide between creationism and evolution. It's more about how our feelings color the way we see the world, how painful grief can be, and the power of forgiveness and mercy. Andy is a terrific character--both well-developed and human in his fallibility. I didn't care as much for Melissa, but Grodstein does a great job of sympathetically portraying her world view. (And with Lionel, she shows how, for some people, belief is what matters.) It raises all sorts of interesting questions, and it's wonderfully written.
    • 3/5
      The Explanation of Everything proves why Grodstein’s work is lauded by readers and critics alike. Her writing is lovely and well-considered. I loved the details that supported the intimate portrait of Andy’s relationships with his daughters, his neighbor, Sheila, and his place among the faculty and staff. Grodstein made it easy to see why Andy arrived at some of his conclusions, and how he could have wandered so far off track.

      Still, there was something missing (a lack of urgency, too much apathy from the characters?), that was hard to pinpoint and bogged the story down. While I was happy enough while reading it, I didn’t find particularly compelling reasons to go back to it once I had set it aside. While Andy and his daughters were fully realized (and maybe even Lionel, whose character I really enjoyed), the revolving female characters would have benefited the novel had they been fleshed out a little more. I also would have liked to have more cohesion in the way certain story lines were linked. Halfway through, a story that was before only mentioned in passing, takes center stage in a way that is rather jarring, even though it’s also one of the more fascinating aspects of the book. As carefully paced as it is the ending is rather abrupt and vaguely unsatisfying.

      Ultimately, The Explanation for Everything didn’t work for me as fully as I had hoped, but Grodstein is an author whose work I will continue to look forward to.
    • 4/5
      I won this book from Librarything, and I was glad I did. I was not familiar with Grodstein and don't think I would have chosen to buy this book based on the description of the story. I would have assumed that it was meant to be didactic. However, it was beautifully written and deceptively complex. Characters struggling with faith, science and how to make sense of life. There is no clean resolution, but a suggestion that extremism in any form is dangerous, and that meaning can come from small and big connections between people. None of which is conveyed in a didactic manner, but rather through lovely complex characters. It make me feel like reading other books by Grodstein.
    • 4/5
      Lauren Grodstein tackles the origins of life and where we find meaning in this beautiful story of life, death, and rebirth. She handles the seriousness of this topic with beauty and lyrical prose. I appreciated the various perspectives her characters presented. Occasionally in novels about heavy topics such as this the authors personal view comes through. One comes away with a feeling of being used or manipulated. Not so in this case. Through her characters I viewed the issues from different perspectives and felt the emotions involved in their beliefs. This moving story had me riveted from the first page through the last page.
    • 4/5
      I (mistakenly?) received an Advanced Reading Copy of this book. It's not something I would have selected were I browsing a bookstore, but I actually enjoyed it quite a bit.Andy is a widower with two young girls and a biology teacher at Exton Reed, who also teaches a class on evolution his students call "There is No God." Melissa is looking to do an independent study on intelligent design and hopes to change Andy's mindset and help him find faith. The two are an unlikely pair, but grow into friendship (and something more?) throughout the semester as Andy explores the idea of faith seriously for the first time in his life.What I like about this book (not being religious myself) is that it left me with a feeling that religion and evolution can coexist. Personally, I don't put much thought into how we got here or why we're here, but this book explored two very different mindsets for how this all came to be. I didn't feel like Grodstein's characters were trying to push me one way or the other. Andy was very human and it made him easy to read about. I found Melissa slightly annoying, but perhaps I was supposed to. I can't say I hardly put this book down, however, it was very easy to just keep reading.
    • 2/5
      a little obvious. The godless atheists searching for meaning and happiness ... can't find it without god. A veteran biology professor cannot satisfactorily refute some of the oldest creationist strawmen ... please. I can see what the author was aiming for here, and can sympathize with how she was trying to get there ... but anyone with any kind of knowledge of biology and evolution will be immediately put off by the obvious and heavy-handed use of Intelligent Design flummery. Just for the record, ID is NOT science in any way. It does not create hypotheses, and is not falsifiable ... something that Andy, the protagonist, actually mentions early in the story, but this fact is waved away by the mention of Michael Behe and disbelief assertions. Sorry, just because you can't see how things might happen doesn't mean they are false. Honestly I was a bit offended by the story .. I read it for a friend so as to be able to participate in her book club and will likely keep most of these opinions to myself when we discuss it.
    • 4/5
      Lauren Grodstein tackles the origins of life and where we find meaning in this beautiful story of life, death, and rebirth. She handles the seriousness of this topic with beauty and lyrical prose. I appreciated the various perspectives her characters presented. Occasionally in novels about heavy topics such as this the authors personal view comes through. One comes away with a feeling of being used or manipulated. Not so in this case. Through her characters I viewed the issues from different perspectives and felt the emotions involved in their beliefs. This moving story had me riveted from the first page through the last page.
    • 3/5
      At about Chapter 9, I started feeling like I was reading a christian faith, spiritual genre book. And somewhat caught by surprise. I have always had a duo belief in evolution and creation - feeling that the truth is a mix of the two -so a spiritual book wouldn't turn me off nor would a scientific thought - Moving on to the ending of the book. I am not sure what the genre of this book is. I think there where questions on morality, God as mercy and justice as well as forgiveness, life and the hereafter, etc... This is definitely a book full of topics for discussion which could get heated on either side. Interesting and worth the read.  
    • 2/5
      When I began this book, I wasn't drawn in, but I was interested enough in the premise that I was held by the story. As the book went on, though, this grew less and less true, and I grew more and more annoyed with what had become an overtly predictable--and sometimes unbelievable--story about characters that were, more and more, not much better than stereotypes. By the time I reached the novel's finish, I was glad to be done, and ready to avoid this author in the future.It's also important to note that this should be an incredibly touching book. Given the premise and the situations of the characters, this book should bring readers through a range of emotions cycling from grief to humor, and back again. It took me a while to pick up this book, in fact, specifically because I expected to be emotionally affected by the protagonist's situation. And, yet. I can honestly say that I never felt real emotion drawn out by the narrative, which is a damning statement to begin with. It occurred to me last night, when I put the book down with only forty pages left to read, and no desire to continue, that Grodstein might have written with a view toward making the protagonist's narrative overtly objective in tone, discouraging emotional connection. I don't know whether this is giving her too much credit or not--I'm inclined to think it is simply because I was so disappointed with so many aspects of the novel--but should this actually be the case, it was a failed experiment. The result was an emotionally disconnected narrative that came across as fairly disinterested and boring, centered on stereotypical characters and situations which felt only half-drawn.By the end of the book, as you might by now realize, I was extremely frustrated. While the book attempts to examine individuals struggling with crises in believe and faith--in science, in God, in personal philosophy, and in morality--it ends up making light of faith itself. By portraying characters whose lives have centered on a specific type of faith, and then showing them not just questioned, but fully doubted and reversed, over and over again, faith becomes little more than a mockery of itself within the book, and the characters end up seeming unbelievable as a result. Simply, while crises of faith do happen--in science and in faith and in any other area--they do not happen so simply or painlessly as the writer depicts. And, certainly, they are not full of the cliched questions her characters center their doubts on. Most of the questions which center the characters' struggles are questions which any mature individual would have moved through, or come to, far earlier in their lives. The fact that they face them suddenly at these junctures is just short of laughable, cruel as that may be to say, and suggests that the writer is exploring a struggle that she herself hasn't truly experienced. I'm not someone who believes that a writer must necessarily write about what they know...but, in terms of emotions, that may be true, at least in this case.Simply, this book much left to be desired, in terms of both believability and depth. It had some clever and funny moments, but most of the moments which could have distinguished the book as having real character, or being truly original, were given and then left behind in the span of a paragraph, leaving this reader (at least) both disappointed and wondering--why are the interesting moments constantly left behind in favor of returning to the cliched?I expected far far more, and I wouldn't recommend this. So far, I write in August, this is the disappointment of the year for me.
    • 1/5
      I imagined this would make for a good summer read, but I'm afraid I just couldn't connect with the characters. The premise sounded promising, and unlike other reviewers I wasn't put off by the idea that a professor of evolutionary biology would decide to mentor a creationist student. I just found that I didn't care enough about Andy and his life after his wife died to keep reading. The book isn't badly written, there just wasn't anything intriguing about Andy or his life to keep me turning the pages.
    • 4/5
      Got this book as an Early Reviewer copy from Library Thing. The main premise is that Andy, an evolutionary biologist who teaches a class called "There is No God", gets approached by Melissa, a student who wants to do her thesis on intelligent design. Although the characters are interesting, the main premise is that both points of view have valid points with reasons why people want to believe that particular way. The author, an atheist, says she would like to see us all "just get along" already! I don't think my church would go for it, but I think it would be a great book for our church book club. Lots of points to discuss here, and no easy answers.
    • 3/5
      Before I started reading this book, I had low (or no) expectations for it. When it introduced the debate between Intelligent Design and Darwinian Evolution, I was very intrigued, for it seemed to give both sides of the debate an equal voice. That so rarely happens in any book, fiction or not, that I was actually excited. Discussion about genetics too! This was my kind of book. Except that I should have noticed it was not very long. A book of this length can't do justice to genetics or origins. In the end, it was bit of a let down.To be fair, the book doesn't come down too hard on other side, nor does it really set out to sway a reader one way or the other (though not unexpectedly, Darwin seems to be more fit at the end.) The let down was that the book did not really allow the debate to surface. Just as Melissa and Andy never actually have the discussions and she does not actually convince him with scientific evidence, the book shies away from it also.So this is not a book about genetics or evolution or creation. It's a book about a man who has two daughters, a dead wife, a grad student (or was she undergrad?), a female neighbour, and a research project. He's struggling to keep it together and looking for meaning to life. Does he find it? Hard to say, really.The book is likeable but not profound. It's not pop lit, but it's not cerebral, either. Easy reading for someone who wants a bit of substance even if they're reading on the beach.
    • 4/5
      Andy Waite is just about holding his life together, trying to raise his two young daughters after his wife, Louisa, was killed by a drunk driver. As a biologist, Andy devotes himself to researching the effects of alcohol on laboratory mice. At the mediocre college in southern New Jersey where he teaches, Andy offers a class called "There Is No God" on evolutionary biology. Most of his students are apathetic, except for a few evangelicals who strongly disagree with him. But the unpredictable force of a charismatic evangelical student a young woman determined to prove the existence of intelligent design threatens to undermine more than just his faith in science. Summary HPLI received a copy of THE EXPLANATION FOR EVERYTHING from LibraryThing's Early Reviewers programme.Wow! Not only a brilliant and beautiful cover (Darwin's bird attacking--being attacked--by the biblical serpent) and a heroic hook of a title, but also understandably fallible people flailing about in a net plotted masterly to string them together over and over again. At just over 300 pages, Ms Grodstein uses conversations (almost informal Socratic dialogues) to describe the states that polarize us: to hope or despair; to forgive or to punish; to hold on or to let go; to believe or to question. I can think of a few other novelists who would require twice the number of pages to explore these questions! Despite--wait, maybe because of!-- their crazy behavior and personal failings, the characters remind us of ourselves. There's not one person in the book I really disliked; it boils down to a question of perspective. Or as Buddhism formulates it, through what "lens" do you view "what is"?So what's yours? Is it belief or biology? Justice or mercy? Realism or idealism? What is your explanation for everything?Mine is "death".8.5 out of 10 Highly recommended to readers who enjoy probing the big questions via fiction.
    • 4/5
      The battle between Darwinism and Intelligent Design serves as the colorful backdrop to the story of college professor Andy Waite. Andy is a single parent, having lost his wife in a drunk driver accident. Andy's world is populated by his two daughters, a neighbor who wants to be noticed, a religiously zealous student, a demure girl who needs a thesis advisor and Andy's own famous college mentor. Each of these characters claim their place in the evolutionary discussion, but as they interact with each other, positions shift, sometimes surprisingly. In the end, each is really looking for love and happiness, for meaning. Interesting, warm and not preachy! A good solid read.
    • 3/5
      Andy Waite, an avowed atheist, is a single dad raising two young daughters. He teaches at a small college in New Jersey, and he is still grieving the loss of his wife who was killed by a drunk driver a number of years earlier. The author introduces quite a few important themes: organized religion, Darwinism, forgiveness, guilt, honesty, personal accountability, addiction, justice, even Camus and existentialism get a mention. The problem, in my opinion, is that none are explored in any real depth, and the big questions are left dangling at the end. Perhaps that is the author's point?Andy feels that he lets everyone down: his students, his mentor, the mother of the young man who killed Andy's wife. Andy certainly has made some questionable choices over the course of the year that this novel covers, yet he is a likeable man, as are his daughters and some of the secondary characters. I just found it hard to really care about any of them.
    • 3/5
      The Explanation For Everything examines the age-old question of intelligent design vs. evolution. Andy Waite, an avowed atheist with a doctorate from Princeton, teaches biology at a small college in New Jersey. Following the death of his wife by a drunk driver, he is raising his two young daughters while coming to terms with his loneliness. When he agrees to mentor an undergraduate student, he finds himself searching for solace from his grief through religion and an inappropriate relationship. As a scientist, he is intrigued and frustrated by the inability to quantify faith. Not unexpectedly, this book has no answers. Ultimately, I found it touched neither my mind nor my heart.
    • 4/5
      I just finished the book. It was well thought out and the note from the author at the end helped explain why she wrote the book. It all tied together in the end, but the chapter about Anita Lim was initially confusing but later made sense within the context of the rest of the book. Overall, I enjoyed reading the book.
    • 3/5
      Something of a frustrating book. Mopey biology professor at a small liberal arts college, raising two kids on his own after his wife was killed by a drunk driver, finds his atheistic beliefs challenged by an undergraduate Intelligent Design-type. Chaos, &c. ensues. It felt too much like something that had been done, and done, and done again.On the other hand, the writing is quite good, and while the characters were eye-rollingly annoying at times, and the debates about evolution vs. design seemed pretty boilerplate (when they happened at all), I was curious to see where Grodstein was going to take the story.