Members Only Book Club

Announcing Lake Park Friend’s Members Only Book Club.  Our inaugural book, Spying on the South, by Tony Horwitz, features an intrepid Frederick Law Olmsted, Lake Park’s landscape architect, journeying through the American south.  Explore how his experience influenced his efforts to reform his own society by creating democratic spaces for the uplift of all. Jock Mutschler, Lake Park Friends VP Communications, will act as moderator. If you would like to participate, RSVP to Ann Wollmer at [email protected] or 414-962-1680.

***The first three current LPF members that recruit a new member to join LPF will receive a free copy of Spying on the South, courtesy of LPF. Please coordinate this through Ann Wollmer (see contact details above).

Book Summary:  On the eve of the Civil War, an up-and-coming newspaper, the New York Times, sent a young travel writer to explore the South, which was alien territory to the Connecticut Yankee correspondent and to his Northern readers. Identified in the paper as “Yeoman,” to protect his identity, the writer roamed eleven states and six thousand miles, jolting the nation with his dispatches about slavery and the extremism of its defenders.
This extraordinary journey would also re-shape the nation’s landscape, driving “Yeoman”–real name Frederick Law Olmsted–to embark on his career as America’s first and foremost architect of urban parks and other public spaces.

Over a century and half later, there are echoes of the pre-Civil War in the angry ferment and fracturing of our own time. Is America still one country? Tony Horwitz, like Olmsted a Yankee and roving scribe, sets forth to find out by retracing Yeoman’s journey through the South. Following his route and whenever possible his mode of transport–rail, riverboats, in the saddle–Horwitz travels Appalachia, down the Ohio and Mississippi, through Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, and across Texas to the Rio Grande. Venturing, as Olmsted did, far off the beaten paths, Horwitz discovers colorful traces of an old weird America, shocking vestiges of the Cotton Kingdom, and strange new mutations that have sprung from its roots.