"Slaughter has broken the confines of ordinary narrative history. . . . Books about the business of fatherhood and the trials of sonhood are very rare, and this is a fine one."
--Boston Globe
John Bartram was the greatest horticulturist and botanist of eighteenth-century America, a farmer-philosopher who won the patronage of King George III and Benjamin Franklin. His son William was a pioneering naturalist who documented his travels through the Florida wilderness in prose and drawings that inspired a generation of Romantic poets. In telling their stories, Thomas Slaughter creates a complex and compelling dual biography that is also a history of early American attitudes toward nature.
As he follows the Bartrams through their respective careers--and through the tenderness and disappointment of the father-son relationship--Slaughter examines the ways in which each viewed the natural world: as a resource to be exploited, as evidence of divine providence, as a temple in which all life was interconnected and sacred. The Natures of John and William Bartram is a major work of natural and human history--beautifully written, psychologically insightful, and full of provocative ideas concerning the place of nature in the imagination of Americans, past and present.
"A fascinating page-turner that should not be missed. "
--Michael Kammen, Cornell University
--Boston Globe
John Bartram was the greatest horticulturist and botanist of eighteenth-century America, a farmer-philosopher who won the patronage of King George III and Benjamin Franklin. His son William was a pioneering naturalist who documented his travels through the Florida wilderness in prose and drawings that inspired a generation of Romantic poets. In telling their stories, Thomas Slaughter creates a complex and compelling dual biography that is also a history of early American attitudes toward nature.
As he follows the Bartrams through their respective careers--and through the tenderness and disappointment of the father-son relationship--Slaughter examines the ways in which each viewed the natural world: as a resource to be exploited, as evidence of divine providence, as a temple in which all life was interconnected and sacred. The Natures of John and William Bartram is a major work of natural and human history--beautifully written, psychologically insightful, and full of provocative ideas concerning the place of nature in the imagination of Americans, past and present.
"A fascinating page-turner that should not be missed. "
--Michael Kammen, Cornell University
