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The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring
Nature > Plants - Trees
- Random House Trade
- Paperback
- 9780812975598
- 7.94 X 5.16 X 0.7 inches
- 0.5 pounds
- Nature > Plants - Trees
- (Single Author) Asian American
- English
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Book Description
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.
Author Bio
Richard Preston is a bestselling author of 10 books, nonfiction and fiction, whose works reveal hidden worlds of nature and wonder. His books have been published in more than 35 languages. Preston is a contributor to the The New Yorker, and all of his nonfiction books have first appeared as articles there.
His awards include the American Institute of Physics science-writing award and the National Magazine Award, and he’s the only non-physician ever to receive the Centers for Disease Control’s Champion of Prevention Award. An asteroid has been named for him. Asteroid 3792 Preston travels on a wild orbit near Mars, and could some day slam into the earth.
Source: richard-preston.net
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