| Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 G ED-IF AF | |
|
|
|
The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring | 
 enlarge | Author: Richard Preston
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy New: $10.88
You Save: $5.12 (32%)
New (28) Used (22) from $6.98
Rating:  82 reviews
Sales Rank: 12015
Media: Paperback
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0812975596
Dewey Decimal Number: 585.5
EAN: 9780812975598
ASIN: 0812975596
Publication Date: February 12, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
| |
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
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.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 77 more reviews...
 It's Wild Up There April 12, 2007
R. Hardy (Columbus, Mississippi USA)
95 out of 100 found this review helpful
Kids climb trees. Then they grow up and climbing trees is one of the things of childhood they put away. Except some don't give it up. Some keep it as a hobby, and some even make academic careers from climbing trees. Richard Preston is the hobbyist kind. He is better known as a nonfiction author of such bestsellers as _The Hot Zone_ and _The Demon in the Freezer_, scary nonfiction books about dangerous diseases. He has turned his attention to tree-climbing, done by him and by professional and amateur tree enthusiasts in _The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring_ (Random House). There are still scary stories here, because this isn't the sort of tree climbing that kids do. These climbers take special equipment and haul themselves up the redwoods, 35 stories high. Sometimes they fall, but the risk of the endeavor does not seem to the attraction. They have a romantic obsession with the big trees; some of them have harnessed the obsession into academic papers and college careers, but others just climb to do so. The tree canopy sounds like an enticing place, as Preston describes it, "a world between the ground and the sky, an intermediary realm, neither fully solid nor purely air, an ever-changing scaffold joining heaven and earth, ruled by the forces of gravity, wind, fire, and time." Understandably, most of us aren't going to visit there, and most of us aren't going to meet the climbers who are smitten by the canopy, but Preston's lovely, enthusiastic descriptions of the climbers and the climbed make this an enticing report from a foreign world.
Botanists estimate that the bigger ones are over two thousand years old. Many of the tree climbers here are motivated to find the one tallest tree (and by the end of the book, they do find it, but no tree and no record stands forever). How tall a tree is would seem to be something easy to measure, but measuring a tree that is 360 feet tall to within an inch is a technical challenge. The only real way to measure the height of a tree for documentation of record-breaking is to go up with a measuring tape. There is more to such climbs, though, than breaking records. No one had suspected, before people started climbing in the canopy and spending time there, that there was "what amounted to coral reefs in the air". Not just redwoods are up there, but whole ecosystems based upon the trees, consisting of plants and animals that never come down, or that die if they do come down. There are ferns, huckleberries, earthworms, and salamanders up there, and even other trees; hemlocks, laurels, spruces, and Douglas firs have all been found growing with roots hundreds of feet in the air. The enthusiasts who scale these heights use specialized gadgets and ropes. A hammock called a Treeboat is used for overnighting in the trees, but it is a good idea to keep an extra rope on yourself in case you roll out of bed during the night. Preston has had to keep some of his secrets; the locations of some of the trees and groves he describes are given only in general terms to keep them from being tourist sites. Recreational climbing will damage a tree; "a stray kick of a climber's boot, and centuries' worth of soil and plants could be knocked off a branch." One of the most experienced climbers keeps his rope techniques classified, as he does not want recreational climbers to take advantage of them.
It isn't all biology and technology here. The humans involved are more than just tree-huggers. One is famous for finding the biggest trees, but has an intense and crippling fear of heights. Steve Sillett climbed a redwood for a lark when he was nineteen, and has been climbing and writing scientific papers on the trees and the creatures they contain for the past thirty years. Marie Antoine, a tomboy who climbed trees as a girl, did similar research, specializing on Lobaria itself. Sillett and Antoine are the stars of the book, eventually dating high up in the branches; lovemaking in a Treeboat sounds complicated. There was one big problem when they eventually got married: "The problem was to find a minister who could climb a redwood." Preston himself describes his own process of learning to climb, and that of his family who took too it. "I think it's very likely that we were the first tourists ever to visit Scotland to climb trees," he writes, and they were the first to explore the canopy of the Scotch pines there. There are plenty of ecological lessons here, whether in Scotland or California, most of them having to do with how humans have been bad for the huge forests that used to cover the temperate zones. The climbers, however, have the sort of love and respect for the trees, and the interest in learning about their biology, that may help preserve and expand the current protected stands. Let us hope Preston's informative book helps, too.
 Beautiful trees, thoughtless people. May 6, 2007
J. Branson (Seahurst, WA United States)
30 out of 42 found this review helpful
[Edited to add: Read The Hidden Forest by Jon Luoma instead--a much better book.] The Hidden Forest: The Biography of an Ecosystem
Richard Preston's book, Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring, is really a story of obsession and recklessness. It is clear that, for both the author and the subject of the book, the quest for knowledge is just an excuse for adrenaline addiction. While Preston does give us glimpses of the interesting and intricate biology of the canopy of the redwood forest, and of other forests, I would like to have learned much more about these plants and animals. I would also have appreciated knowing far less about many of the people in the story, especially Steve Sillett. I found myself skipping over the melodrama and the self-destruction so I could get to the good parts about the trees.
At the beginning of the story, Steve Sillett is a dangerous idiot who doesn't even know how to check the oil in his car. He free-climbs a giant redwood with the full knowledge that what he is doing is illegal and very likely to kill him. As the story progresses and Sillett becomes a professor of botany, you think he might have learned something. When Richard Preston asks to be taken up into the canopy, 350 feet above the forest floor, Sillett seems to have the good sense to say no. He says, "Not only are the redwoods sensitive to damage from climbing but the whole habitat of the redwood canopy is fragile." And, refering to the safety of the climber, he says, "These trees are gnarly. There are places in the Atlas Grove where I can't justify the risk of letting anyone climb." Just a few pages later, Sillett is leading the amateur climber up into the canopy. When they go to Australia to "study" the tall trees there, they are told by the local climbing expert that not only should they not climb the trees while it's windy, they shouldn't even be in the forest on a windy day, due to the significant hazard of dead wood falling and killing someone. Of course, Sillett leads Preston and his wife on a climb high into the canopy on a very windy day while the trees are rocking. There are about a dozen points in the story where Sillett could easily have been killed. That he didn't die doesn't make him heroic, only lucky.
This would have been a great book if it had been about the trees. Instead, the story glorifies the "spirit of adventure," which is actually just plain foolishness, of the author and the subject. Sillett says of the redwood canopy, "If people start climbing around in it for recreational reasons, it will inevitably be damaged." The hero treatment that Preston gives Sillett will only encourage young adventurers to do exactly what he says they shouldn't. The book proclaims it is about the love of these magnificent trees, but I fear it will do more damage than good.
I have walked through the redwoods, and it was one of the best days of my life. There was an amazing amount to see while sticking to the trail. If I can see a 340 foot giant from the trail, do I really need to bushwhack and damage the ecosystem to see a tree that's 30 feet taller? This book should have cultivated a love of the trees for their own intrinsic beauty, and for what they can teach us about our world. Instead it pitches the trees as a playground for adventure, and this attitude is bound to lead to habitat damage.
A Jewel Among the Rocks April 28, 2007
Roger Winter (Willow City, Tx USA)
25 out of 26 found this review helpful
My wife and I are voracious readers and often settle for books that are OK, but not noteworthy. Every so often a jewel pops out of nowhere and The Wild Trees is just such a book.
We were early readers of The Life of Pi, and feel this book is just such a read. Editorially, they are miles apart, but both books surprise you by just being wonderful and refrshing.
Within 30 pages of the start, you will be breathless, and then the character development begins. There is the poor son of a billionaire, a wonderful love story and of course the trees. The wonderful magnificent trees. And, it's all true.
I just bought 12 copies to send to my reading friends and just felt it would be a good thing to let others know.
Enjoy.
Wonderful April 16, 2007
Seth J. Frantzman (Jerusalem, Israel)
24 out of 26 found this review helpful
This brilliantly written story combines science and trees and climbing into one long adventure that makes the reader happy and brings these great trees to life. Redwoods are massive, the tallest trees int he world and the tallest one has recently been discovered at 379 meters by Michael Taylor, a tree surfer and avid climber who pioneered new climbing techniques. This book explores not only his story but that of many others who have come to love the Redwoods and understand them.
The trees themselves are more than 2,000 years old, at least the oldest are and there is much we can learn about our world through them. They contain up to 50% of all the new species being discovered in the world today in their living canopies. A veritable ecosystem grows up in the canipy of the tree, so that there are in fact mini-climate zones within the trees expanse.
This book evokes the granduer and majesty of the natural environment and those that have pioneered studies and also climbing and other mavericks and wonder-lusts.
A brilliant, rollicking book.
Seth J. Frantzman
Redwoods On High April 21, 2007
C. Hutton (East Coast, USA)
23 out of 27 found this review helpful
Mr. Preston has made a career from writing thrillers about killer diseases (The Hot Zone -- 1994; The Demon in the Freezer -- 2002; The Cobra Event -- 1997). In "The Wild Trees", the author shifts direction and writes about the the Redwoods trees of California (hence the title). While not the thriller like his earlier books, it is interesting about a little known topic. The heart of the book is about the lives of the eccentric scientists who climb the Redwoods for exploration. It is a good read on a cool spring night.
|
|
|
| |
