One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest

Long before it became trending to shamin-tour, Wade Davis was investigating cultural anthropology and ethnobotany. I was familiar with 'Serpent and the Rainbow' and thought it was an interesting hypothesis and an entertaining read. When I read 'One River' in '96 when first released, it had a profound effect. Particularly for drawing attention to the resources in the Amazon and rich potential there being squandered.It's not a heavy scholastic treatise, though he does show his technical hand from time to time. It is presented as a parallel adventure story with a healthy openness to the unknown. I think the most refreshing aspect is how Mr. Wade doesn’t approach his investigation with dogmatic superiority, but by suspending preconception to allow for the possibility there may be knowledge that might not be defined so easily with chemical analysis, diagrams, and .Mr Davis has been criticized in academic circles, a bit unfairly in my opinion, partially due to his Harvard pedigree, not following stricter disciplines and, I suspect, partly for being populist. It precisely because he makes it accessible, and the subjects he approaches tend to have esoteric overtones that push conventions, that drew me the book in the first place. It, along with The Power Broker by Robert Caro (a different kind of jungle adventure), have become my go-to book gifts to close friends over the years. I highly recommend it.On a side note; while very good in its own right, (the 'other') Amazon's film Embrace the Serpent owes more than a passing nod to 'One River' imo.

'One River' is full of great stories and anecdotes as well as a sense of place and time that are unforgettable. I'm giving it four stars for reasons stated below and so won't focus on the positives which have already been so well covered by many reviewers. These are fairly minor quibbles in an otherwise good book.Stylistically, the narrative doesn't always flow well. Wade presents the life of the books central character, Richard Schultes, in some sort of chronological order, but interjects anecdotal stories out of order requiring the reader to have a good memory to keep everything straight. This is a long detail-rich book with 1000s of people and place names covering about a 150 year timespan from the Amazon Jungle, to the Andes to Central America and the American West.The amount of detail is at times excessive, in particular with place names and locations, Wade sometimes spends as much time describing where a place is (a 50 person village in the jungle) as he does about the place itself before moving on to the next place - it feels like a rote travel log at times, probably because he used Schultes private botany journals as one source. There is so much detail it sometimes crowds out the big picture, lost in the trees. I think the book could have been edited back 100 pages or so, there is just a lot of material that is pure anecdote or trivia.Finally and probably most importantly, as a life of Richard Schultes, this is pure hagiography. He is the hero of the story in all respects. Perhaps hagiography is helpful in motivating students to become scientists, but it is not a balanced objective biography, it is a tribute by one of his admiring students, Wade plays up Schultes accomplishments but does not question or examine his failures. For example, Schultes spent the majority of his career in the Amazon studying the rubber tree and became the world expert, yet he never did complete a book about it, what a tragic loss. I don't mean to disparage Schultes, but given his stature and reputation, the lack of any criticism naturally draws the question Wade never asks. The book was written in 1996 and Shultes died in 2001 so with time we may see a more balanced perspective.

This book is simply amazing.That’s my short summary.Here’s a longer summary:This book is a travelogue of Wade Davis’s experiences in Columbia and surrounding regions, employed together with Tim Plowman to continue the ethnobotanical explorations begun by Professor Richard Evans Schultes of Harvard University. That’s the basic premise, but reading the book is an emotionally rich experience that reaches far, far beyond that. I am left with a sense of what is was like to explore the jungles of South America in the 1940’s on the remarkably exotic mission of discovering and categorizing new plants, many of them with hallucinogenic properties that are relevant to the modern resurgence of this topic in academic research. Davis, an accomplished anthropologist, is also a gifted writer. Through his writing I have traveled back in time and witnessed the horrific cruelty of the Spanish invasion in these regions, witnessed the landscape in all of its beauty and incessant sogginess, and come to know some of its people and how they have molded their lives to cope with the hardship and ultimately to transcend that hardship through their relationship with the biodiversity that surrounds them.This book is an epic journey. As someone who plows through 50 books a year on average, I put this as one of my five all-time favorites. It was that good. On a five star scale, I give it six.

Recebido em bom estado. Os livros do Wade Davis são ótimos. Você viaja junto com o autor nas suas experiências.

Very well written. It literally transports one in the company of Wade Davis through the Amazon, it's peoples and customs. Also covers the exploitation of Western "civilization" of its resources and worst of all its treatment of the Amazon peoples' in the greed for more and more rubber latex, gold, timber and petroleum. Simply horrendous, the misery and suffering the so called "civilized white man" and his religion inflicted on these tribes during the rubber exploitation as late as the 1940s is tantamount to genocide to hold responsible the culprits in the Hague today. A 1500s conquest of the American continent all over again. On the bright side Wade takes one on a botanical excursion into these forests with his mentor, the imminent ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, to discover undescribed species by the hundreds, the use of medicinals and entheogens by the Amazon tribes and their knowledge of the forest and its plants that defy botanists to this very day. Recommended reading to the armchair anthropologist, botanist and traveller.

I bought this book because it talks about Richard Schultes adventures all over Latin America. In 1938 he visits a little town called Huautla De Jimenez, Oaxaca, where my grandfather is from, he talks about my grandfathers life and his daily activities, his name is Jose Dorantes and he helped Richard Schultes having contact with the natives of the town for doing mushrooms research. It’s a very nice book. I love it and it helped me find more information about my grandfather in his young years.

Este libro transporta al lector a otro mundo. Varias historias de botánicos de mezclan y hacen que uno conozca los misterios de la amazonía y las plantas mágicas. Muy recomendado.

I cannot read this book. It is in a lamentable state, as if the printers cutting machine was offset & many pages are stuck together which means I run the risk of damaging book if I try to separate them.