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"How the Body Prays"
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The most recent fiction to emerge from the rich soil of the Sunflower State (but by no means the least eyebrow-raising), though, takes the form not of a novel but of Kansas's new science education guidelines. These were recently rewritten by a group of conservative theorists who apparently have a bone to pick with another great writer, Charles Darwin.

That virtually all mention of evolution has been excised from the Kansas testing standards must have Darwin spinning in his grave (provided he has not yet entered the fossil record on which he based his theories). Indeed, some readers will be startled to learn that the evolution debate has never really been conclusively settled. A return to its key books -- as well as to one seldom referred to in this context -- is therefore in order.

The Genesis Flood By John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 518 pages The Voyage of the Beagle By Charles Darwin Penguin Books, 456 pages The Origin of Species By Charles Darwin Penguin Books, 477 pages The Wizard of Oz By L. Frank Baum Puffin Books, 189 pages

"The Voyage of the Beagle," Darwin's annotated diary of a five-year expedition to South America, published in 1840, careens from finches to tortoises, from wounded Argentine officers to barking plovers "wrongfully accused of inelegance." Through all of it, from Patagonia to the Galapagos and beyond, Darwin maintains an almost ingenuous curiosity, recording the countless observations that would lead to the theories set out 19 years later in "The Origin of Species."

But, as Henry Morris and John Whitcomb point out in their 1961 treatise "The Genesis Flood" -- a creationist classic and their counterthrust to "The Origin of Species" -- Darwin's theory remains just that: a theory. Since no one was standing around watching when primitive life first appeared on the globe, they argue, who's to say when or how -- or why -- it got there? To explain the variety of life as we know it, one need reach no further back than the 35,000 or so animals that Morris and Whitcomb, after some painstaking calculations, have determined were sheltered on the ark, and from which all the beasts of the modern world are, naturally, descended.

Morris and Whitcomb trot out chemical, geological and meteorological evidence to support their contentions, though most of their arguments are of the somewhat shaky "cannot be disproved" variety. Despite the fact that there is much questionable science in their book, it can be entertaining to indulge theories about the "antediluvian vapor canopy" (see Genesis 1:6-7) and the geological changes wrought on the earth during "creation week," as Morris and Whitcomb dub the six days in which God created "the heaven and the earth" (as well as a seventh day, on which it is commonly assumed He put His feet up in front of a Saints game).

Such oddities aside, a vast sea of conflicting arguments divides "The Voyage of the Beagle" from the story of Noah's ark. There is, however a third voyage that may shed light on the debate, one first undertaken a century ago by another Kansas literary figure: a gingham-clad young girl known simply as Dorothy.

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