The Natural History Society Book Club will meet on Monday, February 23, 3:30 to 5:00 pm to discuss The Big Burn, by Timothy Egan.

On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men—college boys, day workers, immigrants from mining camps—to fight the fire. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them.

Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force. Equally dramatic is the larger story he tells of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by and preserved for every citizen.

For location and directions, contact Chris:  jltnatural@saveland.org

The Natural History Society Book Club will meet on Monday, January 26, 3:30 to 5:00 pm to discuss The Highest Tide, by Jim Lynch.

One moonlit night, thirteen-year-old Miles O’Malley sneaks out of his house and goes exploring on the tidal flats of Puget Sound. When he discovers a rare giant squid, he instantly becomes a local phenomenon shadowed by people curious as to whether this speed-reading, Rachel Carson obsessed teenager is just an observant boy or an unlikely prophet.

The Highest Tide is a poignant coming-of-age story and a gripping novel of natural wonder about one boy’s enchantment with the sea during a summer that will change his life, and the lives around him.

For location and directions, contact Pat at jltnatural@saveland.org

The Natural History Society Book Club will meet on Monday, December 15, from 3:30 to 5:00 pm to discuss The Jump-Off Creek, by Molly Gloss.

This is the unforgettable story of widowed homesteader Lydia Sanderson and her struggles to settle in the mountains of Oregon in the 1890s. The Jump-Off Creek gives readers an intimate look at the hardships of frontier life and a courageous woman determined to survive.

For location and directions, contact Wendy at jltnatural@saveland.org

The Natural History Society Book Club will meet on Monday, November 17, from 3:30 to 5:00 pm to discuss Of Men and Mountains: The Classic Memoir of Wilderness Adventure, by William O. Douglas.

William O. Douglas was one of that rare mix of man that helped define America, a judge of the supreme court and also a lifelong outdoorsman. This is his story in his words and conveys the joy he felt for the wild untouched vastness of the great forests and the high snow capped peaks which he pitted himself against.

For location and directions, please RSVP to Wendy at JLTnatural@saveland.org

The Natural History Society Book Club will meet at 3:30 on Monday, October 27, to discuss In Earshot of Water: Notes from the Columbia Plateau, by Paul Lindholdt.

Whether the subject is the plants that grow there, the animals that live there, the rivers that run there, or the people he has known there, Paul Lindholdt’s In Earshot of Water illuminates the Pacific Northwest in vivid detail. Lindholdt writes with the precision of a naturalist, the critical eye of an ecologist, the affection of an apologist, and  the self-revelation and self-awareness of a personal essayist in the manner of Annie Dillard, Loren Eiseley, Derrick Jensen, John McPhee, Robert Michael Pyle, and Kathleen Dean Moore.

Exploring both the literal and literary sense of place, with particular emphasis on environmental issues and politics in the Northwest, Lindholdt weds passages from the journals of Lewis and Clark, the log of Captain James Cook, the novelized memoir of Theodore Winthrop, and Bureau of Reclamation records growing from the paintings that the agency commissioned to publicize its dams in the 1960s and 1970s, to tell ecological and personal histories of the region he knows and loves.

In Lindholdt’s beautiful prose, America’s environmental legacies—those inherited from his blood relatives as well as those from the influences of mass culture—and illuminations of  the hazards of neglecting nature’s warning signs blur and merge and reemerge in new forms. Themes of fathers and sons layer the book, as well—the narrator as father and as son—interwoven with a call to responsible social activism with appeals to reason and emotion. Like water itself, In Earshot of Water cascades across boundaries and blends genres, at once learned and literary.

RSVP to Chris for location at JLTnatural@saveland.org.