REGISTRATION REQUIRED. Join us for an outdoor book club that focuses on our natural world. We discuss our all-time favorite nature titles, both fiction and non-fiction. The book club meets at parks throughout St. Johns County, practically in your own backyard!

This month we’ll be reading Cat Tale: The Wild, Weird Battle to Save the Florida Panther by Craig Pittman and will be meeting at Canopy Shores Park. It wasn’t so long ago when a lot of people thought the Florida panther was extinct. They were very nearly right. That the panther still exists at all is a miracle–the result of a desperate experiment that led to the most remarkable comeback in the history of the Endangered Species Act. And no one has told the whole story–until now. With novelistic detail and an eye for the absurd, Craig Pittman recounts the extraordinary story of the people who brought the panther back from the brink of extinction, the ones who nearly pushed the species over the edge, and the cats that were caught in the middle. This being Florida, there’s more than a little weirdness, too.  An engrossing narrative of wry humor, sharp writing and exhaustive reportage, Cat Tale shows what it takes to bring one species back and what unexpected costs such a decision brings.

Craig Pittman is an award-winning journalist at the Tampa Bay Times and the author of the New York Times bestseller Oh, Florida!: How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country as well as three other books. His work has won the Waldo Proffitt Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism in Florida four times.  In 2020, he was named a Florida Literary Legend by the Florida Heritage Book Festival. Twice he has won top investigative reporting awards from the Society of Environmental Journalists, a national organization.

This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. If the weather is sunny, please bring your own camp chair for sitting out under the trees. If it’s rainy, we’ll be sitting in the park pavilion. Feel free to bring your own snacks & beverages! Please notify us at least 3 days in advance if you should need a sign language interpreter. This title is available in e-audiobook format on our Hoopla platform.  If you’d like a print copy, please contact Amy at aackerman@sjcfl.us or 904.827.6942.

This book club is a partnership between the St. Johns County Public Library System and the St. Johns County Parks & Recreation Department.  Some materials are supplied by the Friends of the Main Library St. Augustine.