Readalikes: If you enjoyed July's selection . . .

If you enjoyed American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic by Victoria Johnson, then you might also like these books recommended by our discussion group members:

• Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species by Sean B. Carroll.
• Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
• The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
• The Collector: David Douglas and the Natural History of the Northwest by Jack Nisbet
• Hamilton : The Revolution : Being the Complete Libretto of the Broadway Musical, with a True Account of Its Creation, and Concise Remarks on Hip-Hop, the Power of Stories, and the New America  by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter.
• Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation by Andrea Wulf
• The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wulf

July Not Fiction Book Discussions

In The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson, we read about the obsessive and even selfish aspects of a deep interest in natural history, and in American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic by Victoria Johnson, we read about the more generous and civic-minded.

Dr. David Hosack was a contemporary of America's founding generation, and he is perhaps most famous for his role as the attending physician at the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. More importantly, he was also a contemporary of the great explorers and naturalists of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Joseph A. Banks, John and William Bartram, and Alexander von Humboldt. Hosack extended his commitment to medicine and building civic organizations to a deep passion in botany and establishing a botanical garden that would be an educational and research center for the new nation. His Elgin Botanical Garden, created at great personal cost, became the model for the New York Botanical Garden and the more than four hundred botanical gardens and arboreta in the United States today. But as Johnson notes,

. . . Hosack's greatest legacy is perhaps the one that is the hardest to see. He showed his fellow citizens how to build institutions. Over and over, in the face of criticism and misfortune, he rallied people around him to create the charitable, medical, and cultural institutions that make cities worth inhabiting and that educate a nation for generations to come. Philanthropic work is hard and complex. The daily lives of civic organizations--full of meetings, bylaws, elections, and the like--strike many people as dull and unheroic. Because this work and its results are collective, we can't easily single out one hero to celebrate. Yet they take just as much patience, ingenuity, and money as any discovery or invention. Perhaps today more than ever, Hosack's quieter sort of heroism deserves emulation. He dreamed from boyhood about what his generation could do to improve the lives of others.

What do you think? Johnson notes, "We like our heroes to stand alone, so we can easily discern and celebrate their achievements." What are the qualities and achievements we usually celebrate in American heroes? Were you familiar with David Hosack before reading American Eden? If so, was it for his role in the Hamilton/Burr duel, or for his more significant contributions? How would you describe Hosack? We also tend to like our heroes to be uncomplicated, entirely good, but as with many of the founding generation of America, Hosack not only did not take a stand against slavery, his household included enslaved people. How can we make sense of the contradictory aspects of Hosack's character and behavior? As Johnson points out, civic organizations make a city, state, or country worth inhabiting. What kinds of organizations do you feel improve the life of your city, state, or country? Hosack had difficulty securing government support for Elgin Botanical Garden. Should government or individual citizens support these organizations? Looking ahead to the subject of our next two books, what role should government play in research, provision, and regulation of health care and pharmaceuticals?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, July 2, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, July 18, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.