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One River - Explorations
and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest Wade Davis Pages: 540 Buy
now from Mind Books
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| Table of Contents > |
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1. Juan's Farewell 2. Mountains of the Elder Brother 3. The Peyote Road, 1936 4. Flesh of the Gods, 1938-39 5. The Red Hotel 6. The Jaguar's Nectar 7. The Sky is Green and the Forest Blue, 1941-42 8. The Sad Lowlands 9. Among the Waorani 10. White Blood of the Forest 11. The Betrayal of the Dream, 1944-54 12. The Blue Orchid, 1947-48 13. The Divine Leaf of Immortality 14. One River Notes on Sources Acknowledgements Index |
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Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest
Fine biography of Richard Evans Schultes and history of South American ethnobotany. Compelling story by long-time student of both (author of The Serpent and the Rainbow). Starts in 1936 when young Schultes studies peyote use and Mexican mushroom rituals. Great true stories from Schultes' 12 years and the author's 8 years of travel in Amazon basin, learning about ayahuasca, coca, other active plants, and the sad rubber scandal. Good reading science and adventure. Notes and index. - Mind Books The subject of this book is "Timothy Plowman, a young ethnobotanist who died while looking for medicinal plants in the South American rain forests. . . . Plowman was the . . . protege of Richard Evans Schultes, . . . {an authority} on hallucinogenic plants and the Amazon rain forest. The author mixes the backgrounds and travels of the two men with sociology of South American tribes and their sacred plants." - (Libr J) Index. In 1974-75, Wade Davis and Tim Plowman traveled the length of South America, living among a dozen Indian tribes, collecting medicinal plants and searching for the origins of coca, the sacred leaf of the Andes and the notorious source of cocaine. It was a journey inspired and made possible by their Harvard mentor, Richard Evans Schultes, the most important scientific explorer in South America in this century, whose exploits rival those of Darwin and the great naturalist explorers of the Victorian age. In 1941, after having identified ololiuqui, the long-lost Aztec hallucinogen, and having collected the first specimens of teonanacatl, the sacred mushroom of Mexico, Schultes took a leave of absence from Harvard and disappeared into the Northwest Amazon of Colombia. Twelve years later, he returned from South America, having gone places no outsider had ever been, mapping uncharted rivers and living among two dozen Indian tribes. He collected some twenty thousand botanical specimens, including three hundred species new to science, and documented the invaluable knowledge of native shamans. The world's leading authority on plant hallucinogens, Schultes was for his students a living link to a distant time when the tropical rain forests stood immense, inviolable, a mantle of green stretching across entire continents. It was a world greatly changed by the time Davis and Plowman began their journey, nearly thirty years later, and changed further today. - Publisher |
| Reviews/Excerpts > |
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Reviews:
While not technically a biography, this is the story of Timothy Plowman, a young ethnobotanist who died while looking for medicinal plants in the South American rain forests. The author, who explored with Plowman in 1974 and 1975, tells a vivid story of adventure, Amerindian culture, and, to a lesser extent, the social and political climate surrounding Harvard in the 1960s and 1970s. Plowman was the brilliant protg of Richard Evans Schultes, one of the world's leading authorities on hallucinogenic plants and the Amazon rain forest. The author mixes the backgrounds and travels of the two men with sociology of South American tribes and their sacred plants. Because use of hallucinogenic plants is described, this is not a book for young people. For adults, it's a fascinating story of ethnobotanical exploration and an excellent real-life tale of science out of the laboratory, and only peripherally the sad story of a brilliant life lost to AIDS (Plowman contracted the disease as a result of pretrip inoculations). It also reveals the effects of development on the dwindling rain forests and their endangered cultures. Recommended for large collections.Laura E. Lipton, Center for Urban Horticulture, Seattle The book is hagiographic, a rarity nowadays. But unqualified praise is acceptable for someone so admirable and peerless {as Mr. Schultes}. . . . Mr. Davis does full justice to his mentor. An excellent botanist, he learned from Mr. Schultes and Plowman to gain the confidence of shamans and medicine men, to record their mythology and rituals and to experience days of mind-blowing trips and retching nausea--all in the name of science. He writes magnificently,with verve when describing his many adventurous field trips, accurately and efficiently when telling science or history, and with vivid fantasy when portraying hallucinogenic trances. - From John Hemming - The New York Times Book Review The prodigious biological and cultural riches of the vast Amazon rain forest are being lost at a horrendous rate, according to the author, often without yielding their secrets to the Western world. During his years in the South American jungle, ethnobotanist Davis (The Serpent and the Rainbow) has done much to preserve some of these treasures. He tells two entwined tales herehis own explorations in the '70s and those of his mentor, the great Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, beginning in the '30s. Both men have been particularly interested in the psychoactive and medicinal properties of the plants of the Amazon basin and approach their subject with a reverence for the cultural context in which the plants are used. The contrasting experiences of two explorers, a mere generation apart, starkly demonstrates how much has already been destroyed in the rain forest. Although Schultes probably knew more about Amazonian plants than any Western scientist, he was constantly learning of new ones and new uses for them from native experts. Davis graphically describes the brutal clash of cultures from Columbian times to the present, often so devastating for indigenous peoples, that has defined this region. At times humorous, at times depressing, this is a consistently enlightening and thought-provoking study. Photos not seen by PW. (Sept.) - Publishers Weekly A fascinating narrative of the exploits of Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, interwoven with the much more benign adventure of his student, author and ethnobotanist Davis (The Serpent and the Rainbow, 1986). Beginning in the middle 1930s and for the greater part of the next two decades, Schultes journeyed throughout the remote Amazonian jungle to study the psychoactive and medicinal plants used by its indigenous peoples. His discoveries—including the natural plant source for LSD—have filled the annals of ethnobotany and helped kick off the hallucinogenic era of the 1960s. Schultes survived beriberi, malaria, frequent capsizings, and airplane accidents. But perhaps his most adventurous and sometimes dangerous forays were into the psychoactive drug rituals of tribes located deep within the Colombian and Brazilian rainforests. Schultes was recruited by the US government in the late '30s to find and develop new, blight-resistant sources of rubber, a project that was foolishly abandoned, according to Davis, because of bureaucratic infighting and ineptitude. Faintly echoing Schultes's saga is Davis's account of his own 1970s expedition, when he accompanied the ethnobotanist Tim Plowman to the Andean regions of Peru and Colombia to collect specimans of coca and study its cultivation patterns; in the footsteps of their mentor, Schultes, both men sample the hallucinogenic effects of various potions, chew coca leaves, and find themselves in some dicey situations on mountain roads. These episodes are flavored with revealing histories of the brutal Spanish conquest and the more recent but equally gruesome enslavement of Indians to the rubber trade, and contain some sprightly written, at times dryly ironic travel prose. But Davis's own experiences pale by comparison with the main narrative and are interjected at seemingly random intervals. Although Davis might have been better advised to scale down, this is an exceptional tale of 20th-century scientific exploration and a rousing travelogue to places both real and illusory. - Kirkus Reviews Excerpts: The idea for this book emerged in a moment of great sadness.
Timothy Plowman was a man of generosity, kindness, modesty, and
honor, and his untimely death at the age of forty-five from AIDS on
January 7, 1989, cut short a career of immense promise. A superb
ethnobotanist with an uncanny ability to gain the trust and
confidence of Indian people, he was the protege of Richard Evans
Schultes, the greatest ethnobotanist of all, a man whose expeditions
a generation earlier had earned him a place in the pantheon along
with Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Bates, and his own
hero, the indefatigable English botantist and explorer Richard
Spruce. |