The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring
by Richard Preston
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Book Summary Information
Author: Richard PrestonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-02-12
ISBN: 0812975596
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Book Reviews of The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring
Book Review: I learned something
Summary: 3 Stars
Both and interesting and someway frustrating book. At the beginning the author kept jumping around from story to story attempting to lay out parts of a picture he would assemble later. I don't think this literary technique worked. If he had queued the reader in before hand there wouldn't have been so much wondering what the book was about and what these character he was introducing had to do with the subject. When it was apparent how all the pieces fit together the skipping was not so disconcerting.
What was the books about? If you are slow like me that only became clear in the final pages. It was about climbing to find the world's tallest tree, not about wild trees, not about canopy biology. They were part of the search but certainly not that interesting to Michael Taylor who just wanted to find the world's tallest tree. Apparently he did. Then one wonders what purpose his life had afterwards. He was not nor did become a canopy naturalist, or any sort of naturalist. As for the other two heroes and one heroine of the book, the main one Steve Sillett now holds the endowed chair of redwood ecology at Humboldt State University in Arcata CA. His wife and co-worker Marie Antoine, is a lecturer there and interested in canopy lichens. The third is the author who in writing about Sillett became intrigued with climbing and joined his subject high up in the trees.
The book is about climbing the worlds tallest trees: climbing trumps. Second it is about the social character of Taylor, Sillett, and Antoine. Third it gives some of the science of tall trees. Although at the beginning I was a bit impatient with the author's coverage of the science he filled in more later. But the book wasn't about the science of canopy which includes much canopy which is not so high up. We learn a bit about lichen, bryophytes and soil accumulation, a bit about the morphology of tall redwoods, Douglas fir, and eucalyptus but it would be nice to have learned more. What is scientifically redeeming about tall tree canopy work and does tallness make for something particularly interesting?
I know there is a literature out there of science as extreme sport. I had a friend at MIT years ago getting a Ph.D. in marine biology. He went off to the marine lab in San Diego. He really just wanted to dive. I certainly love natural history because it puts me out in nature. This literature reminds me of the Everest books. Taylor beat his body to find the tallest tree. The author's picture of Sillett, and Antoine is one mostly of heroic climbing which seems to have become his own passion. The thrill and danger of climbing comes through clearly. What about the science? And why would the main actors want the characterizations of their personalities and private lives be so exposed unless they were a little like the Everest climbers, in it, in part, for the heroism.
Despite all the reservations written here, I enjoyed the book which I listened to on tape. I now have to get myself a laser device and measure the four redwood trees in my front yard ( a guess: 180 ft.) and the ones in Roy's Redwoods near me where a downed one is about 220 ft. Of course I could just get out grammar school protractor.
Charlie Fisher author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World
Summary of The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring
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.
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