Hard to believe this was written by the same author as Eat Pray Love (hated it) because I really enjoyed this book. But totally different kind of book. That was memoir and this was HF. Alma Whitaker is born in 1800 the daughter of a prominent botanist and pharmaceutical magnate. She becomes a botanist herself, her adopted younger sister is an abolitionist. In her 50s she travels to Tahiti, then to the Netherlands. This story is not just of Alma's life, her family, her sexual longings and relationship with her husband, her study of mosses, but also of so much history of the time - slavery, colonialism, imperialism, science vs religion, etc. And really throughout, but especially at the end, the meaning of life. The struggle to survive and thrive (Darwin, but also Alma's theory) and how altruism and religion fit in with that. A very long book at 500 pages, and slow reading because of the history and ideas, but good.
