Darwin's Racists: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow is bound in a glossy white paperback cover. In the background, behind an old-fashioned globe that is suspended on a puppeteer's strings, is a severe-looking line drawing of Charles Darwin. The only color in this austere setting is the deep burgundy of the title and the authors' names. This serious-looking book contains the authors' opinions of how directly Darwin's teachings have influenced (or will influence) past history, current history, and future history. Some of the ideas they put forward are that Darwin and his beliefs are directly to blame for the Holocaust in the past, current non-teaching of creation and glorification of evolution in public schools, and the growing infringements on our freedoms, which could lead to restrictions of those freedoms in the future.

The material in this book is not light reading. I would recommend it for high school age children and older. It could be a great discussion book, but there would need to be a very diplomatic moderator involved if all parties did not agree. All different types of homeschoolers could find this an interesting book to read. There is surprising information about famous historical people and their interactions with Darwin. For example, Karl Marx wrote the following inscription in his book Das Kapital: "From a devoted admirer to Charles Darwin." These kinds of facts could serve as a springboard into an exploration of the relationships between Darwin and his contemporaries. Another approach could be for the homeschooling family to examine their own belief systems and their supporting structures to see how much they have been affected by the evolutionary frame of mind.

Darwin's Racists: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow brings into focus the fact that ideas can have a huge impact on the way that people think, interact with others, and make decisions in the physical realm. This book also encourages the ordinary citizen to be a gatekeeper of ideas and thoughts rather than blindly following where others lead.

One difficulty I had with the book is that the authors not only tried to show Darwin's influence in the world but also tried to showcase the evidence against evolution and the evidence for creation. The work would have been more effective if they had left that debate to another volume and concentrated on the topic at hand. I also would have liked to see more source materials cited. There were a fair number of quotes that had been "retrieved from" various online papers and blogs. When dealing with such a weighty subject, I would like to know that the quote I am seeing has not been tampered with and is taken directly from a physical book or paper.

Product review by Amy Wilbur, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, July 2010