July Book Club

The Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides (APT) will hold its next Zoom book club meeting on Tuesday, July 15 at 7 pm. All are welcome to attend. July's book club choice is Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy by Nathaniel Philbrick.

When George Washington became president in 1789, the United States of America was still a loose and quarrelsome confederation and a tentative political experiment. Washington undertook a tour of the ex-colonies to talk to ordinary citizens about his new government, and to imbue in them the idea of being one thing—Americans.

In the fall of 2018, Nathaniel Philbrick embarked on his own journey into what Washington called “the infant woody country” to see for himself what America had become in the 229 years since. Writing in a thoughtful first person about his own adventures with his wife, Melissa, and their dog, Dora, Philbrick follows Washington’s presidential excursions: from Mount Vernon to the new capital in New York; a monthlong tour of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island; a venture onto Long Island and eventually across Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. The narrative moves smoothly between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries as we see the country through both Washington’s and Philbrick’s eyes.

APT members will find Zoom details in the Tour Talk newsletter the week of the meeting. Non-APT members who would like to participate in the May book club should email APT Secretary Pam Covey at [secretary@phillyguides.org](mailto:secretary@phillyguides.org) no later than 5 pm the day of the meeting to receive the Zoom link. Please join us!