Richard Dawkins to Publish Children’s Book This Fall

Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist, has a new book com­ing out this fall. This time, it’s a chil­dren’s book called The Mag­ic of Real­i­ty: How We Know What’s Real­ly True. Inter­viewed in Der Spiegel in March, Dawkins talked a lit­tle about what he hoped to accom­plish here, say­ing:

Each chap­ter is a ques­tion like: What is an earth­quake? What is a rain­bow? What is the sun? Each chap­ter begins with a series of myths seem­ing­ly answer­ing those ques­tions, and then I counter that with expla­na­tions about the true nature of things. There is some­thing very cheap about mag­ic in the super­nat­ur­al sense, like turn­ing a frog into a prince with a mag­ic wand. Real­i­ty has a grander, poet­ic mag­ic of its own, which I hope I can get across.

Already you can see some pre­lim­i­nary art­work for the book. We have one cov­er design above, and anoth­er one here. We’ll have more on the book when it comes out…