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.

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

If you enjoyed Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy by Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, then you might also enjoy these books recommended by our discussion group members:

• Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South by Christopher Dickey
• Charleston's Avery Center: From Education and Civil Rights to Preserving the African American Experience by Edmund L. Drago with Marvin Dulaney
• Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston
• America's Longest Siege: Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow March towards Civil War by Joseph Kelly
• The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison, with a forward by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Black Charlestonians: A Social History 1822-1885 by Bernard E. Powers

June Not Fiction Book Discussions

Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy by Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts asks us to consider how communal memory is constructed and how that memory affects our relationships within our communities. Kytle and Roberts, historians at California State University, Fresno, explore in depth how Charleston, South Carolina, remembers--or rather, misremembers, or even forgets--its central role in slavery, and how this communal act of misremembering and forgetting affects race relations in the United States today.

Kytle and Blain document in nuanced detail the systematic and institutionalized whitewashing and outright suppression of the truth about slavery in historical tourism beginning as soon as the 1860s, bolstered by Jim Crow violence into the 1960s, and continuing even today by examining how national holidays are celebrated, how historical figures are monumentalized, and how black culture is interpreted and often appropriated. Kytle and Blain help us see that the romantic, moonlight-and-magnolia version of the South and of Charleston in particular that draws thousands of tourists each year rests on fundamental misconceptions. As Kytle and Blain were completing work on Denmark Vesey's Garden in 2015, Dylann Roof visited Charleston, stoking his racial hatred at cultural and historical sites, and ultimately shooting nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. church, the congregation of Denmark Vesey, the black revolutionary who plotted a failed slave insurrection in 1822. Kytle and Blain connect the national communal narrative about slavery to America's current racial divide:

It is hardly a coincidence that whitewashed memories of slavery, the Confederacy, and the Civil War find more fertile ground on the political right than on the left. These ideas, after all, have long reinforced reactionary positions. A century ago, the Lost Cause provided the intellectual and emotional foundation for segregationist laws and customs. Today, the enduring misunderstanding born from Lost Cause mythology make it easier to oppose policies and programs that would redress the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow--from affirmative action and more progressive taxation to criminal justice reform and reparations.

What do you think? If you grew up in Charleston, how does Denmark Vesey's Garden compare with your understanding of the history and culture of your hometown? If you were a tourist in Charleston before moving here, what narrative, explicit or implicit, were you offered by the tours and programs in which you participated? How does Denmark Vesey's Garden challenge this narrative? In your opinion, is Charleston and the United States making progress in having an honest conversation about slavery and its historical legacy? Does it adequately acknowledge black experience and culture? In addition to appropriately interpreting our communal history, what can we do to facilitate this crucial conversation?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, June 4, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, June 20, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

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

If you enjoyed The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson, then you might also like these books suggested by our discussion group members:

• Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake by Frank W. Abagnale
• The White Road: Journey into an Obsession by Edmund de Waal
• The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Edward Dolnick
• Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies by Ross King
• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
• H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
• The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession by Mark Obmascik
• The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession by Susan Orlean
• The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese by Michael Paterniti
• The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed by John Vaillant

May Not Fiction Book Discussions

What is the line between interest and obsession? The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson considers this question through several intertwined stories.

The central story is that of Edwin Rist, an accomplished young American flautist whose deep interest in the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying led him to break into the British Museum of Natural History at Tring and steal hundreds of rare, historically and scientifically significant bird specimens to support his own fly-tying and to sell so that he could buy a golden flute. Supporting Rist's story is that of what Johnson calls "the feather underground," the clannish fly-tying community that shares and encouraged his interest in the feathers of endangered and protected species of birds used for creating their exquisite flies. Parallel in interest but different in intent is the story of naturalists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace who braved dangerous journeys to collect these specimens for scientific purposes. As Johnson comes to see it, it is a "war between knowledge and greed." But perhaps most interesting of all is Johnson's own story. He took up fly fishing to relieve PTSD symptoms resulting from his work coordinating the reconstruction of the Iraqi city of Fallujah for USAID and subsequent work through his own nonprofit, the List Project, to bring Iraqi refugees to safety in the United States. He was waist-high in the Red River in New Mexico when his guide told him Rist's story. Johnson admits, "I don't know if it was Edwin's Victorian-sounding name, the sheer weirdness of the story, or the fact that I was in desperate need of a new direction in life, but I became obsessed with the crime within moments." He would spend much of the next five years investigating Rist's crime, for which Rist avoided any serious repercussions.

What do you think? Have you ever had an interest that verged on obsession? What do you think was behind the obsessive nature of your interest? Why do you think fly-tiers are so interested in rare bird feathers? Is it essentially similar to or different from the interest naturalists like Darwin and Wallace and present-day scientists take in rare species of birds? How does the Internet support and even fuel "the feather underground"? What kind of person does Edwin Rist seem to be? What do you think motivated his crime? Asperger's syndrome? Greed? Something else? What about his accomplice, Long Nguyen? Why did he assist Rist? And what about Johnson himself? Why do you think Johnson was so interested in this story? And why did he decide to include his own story in what is essentially a true-crime narrative?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, May 7, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, May 16, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

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

If you enjoyed Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island by Earl Swift, then you might also like these books suggested by our discussion group members:

The Beans of Egypt, Maine by Carolyn Chute
The Water is Wide: A Memoir by Pat Conroy
The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea by Sebastian Junger
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local--and Helped Save an American Town by Beth Macy
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
The Tillerman Cycle by Cynthia Voigt

You might also enjoy watching this video created by Jeff Leeds Cohn from The Atlantic series The Atlantic Selects posted June 1, 2018 at https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/561587/tangier-island/. In it, viewers meet several of the residents of Tangier profiled in Swift's book and see beautiful footage of the island's landscape. The film has an elegiac tone in keeping with Swift's title Chesapeake Requiem.