Volume 47, Number 1 · January 20, 2000
A Dying World
By John Terborgh
One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest
by Wade Davis
Touchstone, 537 pp., $16.00 (paper)
The Amazon River Forest: A Natural History of Plants, Animals, and People
by Nigel J.H. Smith
Oxford University Press, 208 pp., $29.95 (paper)
Both these books are about the use of native plants by people living in the Amazon basin, but beyond that they could hardly be more different. One River is an adventure story, a biographical account of two plant explorers, Richard Evans Schultes, Oakes Ames Professor of Economic Botany at Harvard, and his student and kindred spirit, Timothy Plowman. Wade Davis, another student of Schultes and a traveling companion of Plowman, describes the experiences of the two scientists as they explore uncharted jungles, encounter unknown tribes, and find botanical specimens whose existence had been unanticipated. Schultes is likened to his hero, the great British botanist Richard Spruce, who for fifteen years in the 1850s and 1860s explored some of the same parts of the Amazon. Nigel Smith's book, while competently written in standard academic language, is a comparatively dry documentary without any stories of personal discovery. It is particularly concerned with the Amazon of the future, whereas One River revels in an Amazon of the past that now, in the 1990s, has all but ceased to exist.
Review, 4745 words
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