The Natural History Society book club will meet on Monday, March 27, 3:30-5:00 to discuss Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer.  For location, contact Jean at jltnatural@saveland.org

Publishers Weekly called Robin Wall Kimmerer “a mesmerizing storyteller with deep compassion and memorable prose” and went on to state that this book will appeal to “anyone interested in natural history, botany, protecting nature, or Native American culture.”  Botanist Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science.  She is a member of the Potawatomi Nation, whose teachings consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers.

Gathering Moss, an earlier book by Kimmerer, was the book selection for January 2016.

Astoria: Astor and Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark is the book selection for February 2017.  The Natural History Society book club will meet on Monday, February 27, from 3:30-5:00.  Contact Jean at jltnatural@saveland.org for location.

Astoria, a true adventure tale of the establishment of Fort Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River,  describes incredible hardships experienced in the wilderness and at sea over the course of three years, 1810 to 1813.  John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson were attempting to found a colony like Jamestown on the West Coast, to transform the United States into a Pacific trading power.  The members of the Astor Expeditions battled nature, starvation, and madness to establish the first American settlement in the Pacific Northwest.  The colony opened American eyes to the potential of the Western coast and its founders helped blaze the Oregon Trail.

The Natural History Society Book Club will read Elizabeth Gilbert’s book The Signature of All Things in the month of January 2017.  We will meet on Monday, January 23, from 3:30 – 5:00. Contact Jean at jltnatural@saveland.org for location.

The Signature of All Things is a fictional tale of Alma Whittaker, daughter of the richest man in Philadelphia in the early 1800s.  Alma becomes a gifted botanist who investigates the mysteries of evolution.  She falls in love with Ambrose Pike, a talented painter of orchids.  The book takes place all over the globe, from Philadelphia to Amsterdam to Tahiti to Peru.  It is set in that extraordinary moment in human history when all the old assumptions about science, religion, commerce and class were being challenged by new ideas.

The Natural History Book Club book selection for November/December 2016 is Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America by well-known Northwest author Ivan Doig.  We will meet on Monday, December 5, 2016 from 3:30-5:00.  E-mail Jean at jltnatural@saveland.org for location.

Ivan Doig describes this book as a “journal of a journal.”  James Gilchrist Swan was one of the first Europeans in the Pacific Northwest.  He kept extensive daily journals of his activities.  We previously read The Northwest Coast, which was Swan’s journals of his first three years in Washington Territory in the mid-1800s in what is now southern Washington State.  Winter Brothers is a fusion of Doig’s winter of 1978-79 in more northern parts of Washington State with Swan’s journals of 1862-1898 in those same locations.  Two prominent locations are Neah Bay and Port Townsend.

This book is a unique blend of modern author (Ivan Doig) with historically important Pacific Northwest pioneer (James Swan).

The Mushroom Hunters by Langdon Cook is the book selected for October.  We will meet on Monday, October 24, from 3:30 – 5:00.  Contact Jean at jltnatural@saveland.org to RSVP and find out location.

A timely book, as fall is “mushroom season” in the Northwest, when the rains begin.

Author Langdon Cook embeds himself in the underground world of “frontier-style capitalism” to reveal the shadowy subculture that brings the highly valued culinary ingredient–-wild mushrooms–-to the tables and restaurants of modern America.  Part science, part suspense, part culinary history–-who would have ever thought an adventure book could be written about wild fungi?  The setting of the book is the Pacific Northwest, including the Olympic Peninsula.