Selected Product:
| The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring
Paperback
Author: Richard Preston
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Release Date: 2008-02-12
ISBN-10: 0812975596
ISBN-13: 9780812975598
List Price: $16.00
Average Customer Rating:
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Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain forest valleys in Northern California are the largest and tallest organisms the world has ever sustained–the coast redwood trees, Sequoia sempervirens. Ninety-six percent of the ancient redwood forests have been destroyed by logging, but the untouched fragments that remain are among the great wonders of nature. The biggest redwoods have trunks up to thirty feet wide and can rise more than thirty-five stories above the ground, forming cathedral-like structures in the air. Until recently, redwoods were thought to be virtually impossible to ascend, and the canopy at the tops of these majestic trees was undiscovered. In The Wild Trees, Richard Preston unfolds the spellbinding story of Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine, and the tiny group of daring botanists and amateur naturalists that found a lost world above California, a world that is dangerous, hauntingly beautiful, and unexplored.
The canopy voyagers are young–just college students when they start their quest–and they share a passion for these trees, persevering in spite of sometimes crushing personal obstacles and failings. They take big risks, they ignore common wisdom (such as the notion that there’s nothing left to discover in North America), and they even make love in hammocks stretched between branches three hundred feet in the air.
The deep redwood canopy is a vertical Eden filled with mosses, lichens, spotted salamanders, hanging gardens of ferns, and thickets of huckleberry bushes, all growing out of massive trunk systems that have fused and formed flying buttresses, sometimes carved into blackened chambers, hollowed out by fire, called “fire caves.” Thick layers of soil sitting on limbs harbor animal and plant life that is unknown to science. Humans move through the deep canopy suspended on ropes, far out of sight of the ground, knowing that the price of a small mistake can be a plunge to one’s death.
Preston’s account of this amazing world, by turns terrifying, moving, and fascinating, is an adventure story told in novelistic detail by a master of nonfiction narrative. The author shares his protagonists’ passion for tall trees, and he mastered the techniques of tall-tree climbing to tell the story in The Wild Trees–the story of the fate of the world’s most splendid forests and of the imperiled biosphere itself.
From the Hardcover edition.
Editing is Lacking an otherwise impressive story idea
| Customer Rating:  | | Loved the content but found the style of writing to be better suited to essays. This booked seems like it was rushed to print before Preston had come up with a suitable way to tell this story. When it gets to the part where he is involved directly with the characters it is more coherent but the chapters that tell the story of each character is better as a stand alone essay. It just seems like a book that is half baked....not crazy...just not ready. Where was the editor? |
Inspired Us to Marry In A Redwood Grove
| Customer Rating: | This is a really wonderful book. Rather than repeat all the accolades and special details, I'll just relay my personal experience.
My then-girlfriend and I read this book together in the summer of 2007 and fell in love with the book and the people and the trees. It inspired us to seek a redwood grove to get married in.
On August 2, 2008, we were married inside an ancient, living redwood tree hollowed out by fire. It was a small, intimate ceremony - we and our 14 invited guests fit inside the tree with room to spare. We had a fantastic time! |
Skip this one
| Customer Rating: | Unless you really really really love botany and tree climbing, I'd skip this one. Instead I recommend 'The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed' by John Vaillant.
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I can't tell a redwood from a dogwood and I still loved it
| Customer Rating: | | I got this book as a gift and was non-plussed. A whole book about people climbing trees? But once I started I couldn't put it down. Terrific writing, great characters and a really compelling story to tell. It was almost enough to make me want to go climb a tree myself. The only complaint I have is that I would have loved to see a few more sketches, or a few pictures, or something to really make plain just how large the trees are for those of us who can't just head off to California to see for ourselves. |
Mythical and mystical account of Coastal Tall Redwoods
| Customer Rating: | | This is a fabulous account of the search for the tallest trees and the resulting studies of the canopy ecosystems. This may sound dry but it is so beautifully written that it is a book you cannot stop reading. |
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