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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This Book Should Be In Hotel Rooms Alongside the Bible!, August 24, 2001
This book by screenwriter/director Matthew Chapman (who also happens to be the great-great grandson of Charles Darwin) is many things. On one hand, it's a wonderfully told piece of history, examining the Scopes Monkey Trial (many think the whole story was told in the play-and-film INHERIT THE WIND, but - as Chapman shows us - there was a lot more to it than most people know). It's also an enlightening and often laugh out-loud funny travelogue as Chapman journeys to Dayton, Tennessee (site of the Scopes Trial) to check out the Evolution vs. Creation debate firsthand. And, finally, it's a hilarious, heartbreaking, and unfailingly honest autobiography: A man's reflection on his most extraordinary life. Whether writing about the amusing characters he met in Tennessee, giving an account of the ups and downs of his career as an A-list writer in Hollywood, or (most movingly) discussing his family and the death of his mother, Chapman is never less than entertaining, perceptive and unflinching. The author is seemingly unable to completely hate anyone, yet he's also laser-beam precise in exposing their foibles (his own most of all). And for those who don't consider themselves religious but still struggle with existential and spiritual matters, TRIALS OF THE MONKEY could also be a helpful and weirdly inspirational book. I read this in two sittings, and found myself for days after regaling friends with anecdotes and lines from it. I have a feeling that TRIALS OF THE MONKEY may well be a classic-to-be, and one can only hope that Chapman's Hollywood career doesn't keep him from writing more books.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wit with your Darwin, November 5, 2001
Prepare to e-mail all your cleverest friends and recommend Trials of the Monkey, Matthew Chapman's wickedly funny, politically incorrect diatribe on religious superstition and other human follies. The narrative is loosely organized around the yearly re-enactment of the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee. In 1925, biology teacher John Scopes was tried for teaching evolution in the public classroom in defiance of Tennessee laws. Chapman has a piquant relationship to his subject: he is the great, great grandson of Charles Darwin, who pioneered evolutionary theory. Chapman's ostensible mission in this book is to travel to Dayton and report on the re-enactment of the Scopes trial. But this purpose is virtually lost in his wickedly delightful portraits of the people he meets on his journey. Chapman, an Englishman living in New York who writes for the film industry, harbors some predictable stereotypes about the rural southeastern United States. Yet he profiles his victims in such intriguing detail and with such wit that reading his book is a lot like eating chocolate mousse: You know you shouldn't, but it's just so delicious. The author doesn't spare himself the edge of his own razor-sharp insight. Alternating chapters are devoted to exposing the most sordid moments of his childhood. But what does Chapman's reckless adolescence have to do with the re-enactment of the Scopes trial? This is where you have to read with some subtlety, but the key lies, perhaps, in the following sentence: "When Darwin called his second book The Descent of Man instead of The Ascent of Man, he was thinking of his progeny." Evolution doesn't always go forward, in other words. Just look at me, the author quips. Similarly, Dayton, Tennessee, which in 1925 gloried in debating evolution with full intellectual vigor, has subsequently subsided into religious complacency and complete denial of scientific discovery, Chapman indicates. Witty, incisive and shockingly irreverent, Chapman's talents have been largely buried in a pile of unproduced Hollywood scripts. Though he has made millions on his writing, he is virtually unknown to the reading world. With luck, Trials of the Monkey will be the first step in reversing that misfortune.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
To hell and back in a monkey suit., February 27, 2002
Full of doubts, fears and inexplicable successes as a not executed screen writer (Stanley Kubrick once said: if every studio in Hollywood turns down a script, it doesn't mean it is a work of genius, yet it is a very sure start.), Matthew Chapman, Darwin's great great grandson, decides to write a book. Using the reenactment of the famous Scopes trial of 1925, where his great great grandfather's teaching are opposed by the law in Dayton Tennessee, ostensibly to find out what, if anything has changed in seventy five years, Chapman sets out to write one book, but luckily for the reader, comes up with a surprisingly fresh and different genre of memoir, accidental as the subtitle reads, yes, but warm, vibrant with and interspersed with questions that lead to more and deeper questions.. He meets a lot of real people down south, all are first introduced as iconic satirical prototypes, but Chapman's intimate curiosity strips the veneer and exposes likable human beings, troubled by qualms yet protected by the bliss of faith; some through ignorance, some through learned resignation. Than, into this murky lake of fear and backbone America, Chapman starts launching pebbles, and his own life story comes fuzzily into focus: a brilliant enthusiastic and loving father, shaded by his hectic life and by a gap of misunderstanding with his wife, Matthew's mother who is a dazzling, witty woman, but one who fails through a repeated line of episodes to come to grips with growing up, until she drowns herself in a sea of alcohol and unquenched anxieties. Chapman's attempt at redemption through God, through bumming, through love, sex, writing, are all confidentially brought under the microscope, dissected analytically, reduced to a little more than yester-dust and than put back together. Chapman questions his life, his fears, his angst, his inability for happiness, his touch and go existence from Millionaire to pauper and back in one fast go, and his constant fear of being found out. Chapman uses the real characters he encounters, together with the historical protagonists of the 'Monkey Trial' of seventy five years ago, as pieces of a mirror, that twist back his reflection, and helps explore another dark place in his persona. A powerful and sincere piece of writing, as good as any I've read lately, and better than most. You care about all the characters, the bit players as well as the semi-hero, as they are al alive, human and vulnerable. A refreshing and pleasantly surprising rendezvous.
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