The Monkey's Voyage: How Improbable Journeys Shaped the History of Life. Alan de Queiroz. Basic Books, 2014. 304 pp., illus. $27.99 (ISBN 9780465020515 cloth). O ceanic islands are remote bodies of ground that rise from the ocean floor; most occur far from any conti-nent. Ranging from specks of rock to large masses, they can be isolated or in archipelagos. They are either active or extinct volcanoes related to volcanic activity on the ocean floor and, more specifically, to the movement of the lithospheric plates. Because of their inaccessibility and enduring isolation, oceanic islands might be expected to be bare and desolate. Although most are, in fact, deficient in whole classes of animals, several are inhabited by a surprisingly high number of spe-cies, and, for many of these animals, transoceanic dispersal would be very unlikely or even impossible. The mystery of how and when organisms reached faraway islands has long intrigued natural scientists. In his book The Monkey's Voyage: How Improbable Journeys Shaped the History of Life, Alan de Queiroz gives his per-sonal solution to how oceanic islands are colonized: natural rafting. The idea is that large masses of vegetation are dislodged by violent storms; carried down rivers; and, finally, buoyed out to sea, forming temporary islands on which animals can take refuge. These fortuitous vessels would then be car-ried by favorable currents to sail rap-idly across stretches of saltwater. This so-called sweepstakes route of immi-gration is currently enjoying particular and growing popularity among bioge-ographers and paleontologists (Hafner et al. 2001, Measey et al. 2007, de Vos etal. 2007, Ali and Huber 2010, van der Geer etal. 2010). It was first described by the eminent paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson in a celebrated anal-ysis delivered before the Washington Academy of Sciences on 15 February 1940 and published in the same year (Simpson 1940). In that influential address, Simpson introduced the term sweepstakes route for the sporadic, accidental, and highly selective disper-sal from a continent to an island. (The term derives from the similar odds between the chances that organisms have to cross such barriers successfully and those of winning a sweepstakes.) Because of its intrinsically stochastic nature, sweepstakes dispersal is gener-ally expected to produce insular faunas that are unpredictable, incomplete, oligo-typical, and technically unbalanced, relative to mainland communities. Using an informal, conversational language, with frequent and colorful slang, The Monkey's Voyage shows a curious crescendo from start to fin-ish. The book comprises two parts. In the first, the author begins softly with two preambles—one on plate tectonics and, in particular, on the breakup of Gondwanaland, the other on cladists' views of the discontinuous distribution of organisms following the disruption of the supercontinent. Although the text is mostly controlled in this part, de Queiroz does not avoid pungent expressions against Léon Croizat and his cladistic or vicariant panbiogeo-graphic theory. Another indispensable premise included in the first part of the book is de Queiroz's passionate endorsement of molecular dating and