Eric Simons, author of DARWIN SLEPT HERE, on NPR's All Things Considered

NPR's resident scientist Robert Krulwich speaks with Eric Simons, author of Darwin Slept Here: Discovery, Adventure, and Swimming Iguanas in Charles Darwin's South America, on "All Things Considered."

2009 is a double-anniversary year for Darwin: the 200th anniversary of his birth in February, and the 150th anniversary of publication of The Origin of Species. Following in Darwin's footsteps, author Eric Simon's new book is an innovative and thrilling new look at Darwin as a young naturalist in South America.

Eric Simons, author of DARWIN SLEPT HERE, Profiled in San Francisco Chronicle

Eric Simons, author Darwin Slept Here, is profiled in today's San Francisco Chronicle: "When Eric Simons grew tired of larking about on a glacier in Tierra del Fuego, it was snowing hard, so he found a shop with books in English, bought a copy of "The Voyage of the Beagle" by Charles Darwin and read the naturalist's charming prose. Simons, 24 then and 28 now, was hooked. He'd had a rigorous grounding in biology from his Castro Valley high school teacher and in evolution from his undergraduate days as a science major at UC Santa Barbara. He'd served a stint writing for a couple of small Bay Area newspapers, but now he was footloose and adventure-hungry at the bottom of the world, where Darwin - seasick aboard the Beagle - had once sojourned briefly. The result of that chance and chilly encounter with history was a quick flight home, a decision to retrace at least some of the naturalist's path, and a twice-over-deeply self-study of Darwin's seminal "On the Origin of Species," plus all the other Darwin writings Simons could lay his hands on. Then came the footsteps: "I wanted to capture his adventures," Simons says. "I wanted to share his experiences and feel the same feelings he must have had because everything in the Beagle book told me Darwin was so joyful, whether he was saddling up with gauchos in Patagonia, or climbing a mountain in Chile, or kicking his heels in the air while he was lying down with a herd of inquisitive camel-like guanacos in a field near Buenos Aires." Simons graduated from UC Berkeley's journalism school last year and his first book is just out. It's called Darwin Slept Here, subtitled "Discovery, Adventure, and Swimming Iguanas in Charles Darwin's South America," published by Overlook Press."

DARWIN SLEPT HERE Reviewed in Outside Magazine

Darwin Slept Here: Discovery, Adventure, and Swimming Iguanas in Charles Darwin's South America, by Eric Simons, is reviewed in the new issue of Outside: "February marks the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and, naturally, he publication of a slew of new books about him. But while most--like the fine, brainy Banquet at Delmonico’s, by Barry Werth—portray the naturalist as an earnest, white-bearded thinker, journalist Eric Simons celebrates a refreshingly different Darwin: a twenty-something traveler fond of hurling iguanas into the sea and charging up any tall peak he could find. With copies of The Voyage of the Beagle in hand, Simons headed for South America, retracing parts of his famous 1831 trip and doing what Darwin did when he wasn’t studying finches: riding with Argentinean gauchos, hunting rheas and ogling senoritas. “There’s a danger in labeling someone as a genius; it makes them inaccessible,” Simons writes. “But Darwin the person—well, he was a lot like us.”