Chairman’s Book Club to discuss Randall Fuller’s 2017 non-fiction title The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation.

Library Board Chairman Frank Housh, who selects books of particular relevance to current issues of the day, will moderate a distinguished panel consisting of:

- Douglas DeCroix, Executive Editor, Western New York Heritage Press

- George DeTitta, Principal Scientist, Jelly Jar Labs & UB Professor Emeritus, Structural Biology

- Reverend Joan Montagnes, Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo

The program is free and open to the public. Copies of the book are available through the Buffalo & Erie County Public Libraries and as a “Book Club in a Bag” offering.

Often cited as “the most influential book ever written,” Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species elicited world-wide response, and often fiery debate, upon its publication in 1859. Fuller’s account discusses a turning point in American intellectual thought in 1860, as the nation was hurtling toward the Civil War, when a just-published copy reaches a dinner party in Concord, Massachusetts. The most influential American intellectuals of the time – Amos Bronson Alcott (father of writer Louisa May Alcott), naturalist Henry David Thoreau, child welfare reformer Charles Loring Brace and abolitionist Franklin Sanborn – around that dinner table each ultimately incorporated Darwin’s assertion of a common ancestry for all creatures as a powerful argument against slavery, the cause that united them. 

Info: 716-858-8900