Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin, and the Battle Between Science and Religion

“I was immediately gripped by Impossible Monsters because he begins this book about—to use its expansive subtitle— ‘dinosaurs, Darwin and the war between science and religion’ at the perfect yet most unexpected point. Archbishop Ussher of Armagh, who was the great scholarly prelate of the 17th century before and during the time of the Civil War, constructed a chronology about when the creation of the world described in Genesis could have occurred. Michael Taylor is absolutely brilliant at describing Ussher’s extraordinary, monumental, logical thought processes, how he used Biblical evidence, reasonable deduction, sparse ancient records and everything else available to him to establish that the world was created 6,000 years ago. It’s easy to think it a silly idea now, but for Ussher and his contemporaries it was a huge, global, conceptual achievement. I think Michael Taylor shows great imagination in starting with that perspective, one that exemplifies how he approaches the whole book.” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Duff Cooper Prize

Minoo Dinshaw, Biographer