Rating: 
Summary: amazing
Review: One of the few eloquint and intelligent writers of present day. Wade Davis mixes art and life into a wonderful collage of sights, sounds and drug induced visions. Totally engrossing and one of the best books I have ever read.
Rating:
Summary: River of Life
Review: One River reads like an adventure story, a character sketch, a history, and a PhD dissertation. How Davis is able to hold so many disparate strands together so well is a true marvel. That he is an excellent writer surely helped but so did his choice of topics-all quite fascinating.Rarely does one pick up a book, especially non-fiction, that cannot be set aside. This book glues itself to your hands and you won't be able to shake it until you've finished. Then you'll wish there were more. In the broadest terms, One River is a biography of Davis's mentor, Richard Evans Schultes. I had become familiar with Schultes's work when researching hallucinogens. Well-known in that particular field, he is renowned generally as the godfather of ethnobotany. Tracing any strand in modern botany you'll find him again and again. He was incredibly prolific and a born adventurer. Many species of plants are named after him because his colleagues so highly respected him. Davis recounts his personal experiences under Schultes-the strange days at Harvard, the mission Schultes sent him on to study cocaine in 1970s Columbia-and then proceeds to unravel his hero's own story. One needs to read the book to appreciate the twists and turns of this plot but let's just say Schultes has taken all drugs, lived with all new world tribes, and regularly voted for Queen Elizabeth II in presidential elections. In spite of his noted eccentricities few scientists could claim such respect or accomplishment. In the early 40s he was employed by U.S. government to find and/or cultivate a new world source of high quality rubber. A decade of work almost resulted in a better rubber that would enrich the people of Central America and ensure the U.S. a constant supply of this industrial mainstay. Please read almost... a single guffaw by some legislators destroyed all this work and left us in the lurch of depending on Southeast Asia for our rubber, a precarious situation to be sure. Throughout the book, the main backdrop is the Amazon. One of the reasons I had trouble putting the book down was because it transported me to that exotic place. Though I was doing my same old routine, I could jump into the narrative and feel like I was on an intrepid vacation never sure what the next bend in the river would bring: menacing or friendly natives, a new species of orchid, other wanderers, a potently hallucinogenic plant? For a thoughtful and engaging read one can do no better.
Rating:
Summary: River of Life
Review: One River reads like an adventure story, a character sketch, a history, and a PhD dissertation. How Davis is able to hold so many disparate strands together so well is a true marvel. That he is an excellent writer surely helped but so did his choice of topics-all quite fascinating. Rarely does one pick up a book, especially non-fiction, that cannot be set aside. This book glues your hands and you won't be able to shake it until you've finished. Then you'll wish there were more. In the broadest terms, One River is a biography of Davis's mentor, Richard Evans Schultes. I had become familiar with Schultes's work when researching hallucinogens. Well-known in that particular field, he is renowned generally as the godfather of ethnobotany. Tracing any strand in modern botany you'll find him again and again. He was incredibly prolific and a born adventurer. Many species of plants are named after him because his colleagues so highly respected him. Davis recounts his personal experiences under Schultes-the strange days at Harvard, the mission Schultes sent him on to study cocaine in 1970s Columbia-and then proceeds to unravel his hero's own story. One needs to read the book to appreciate the twists and turns of this plot but let's just say Schultes has taken all drugs, lived with all new world tribes, and regularly voted for Queen Elizabeth II in presidential elections. In spite of his noted eccentricities few scientists could claim such respect or accomplishment. In the early 40s he was employed by U.S. government to find and/or cultivate a new world source of high quality rubber. A decade of work almost resulted in a better rubber that would enrich the people of Central America and ensure the U.S. a constant supply of this industrial mainstay. Please read almost... a single guffaw by some legislators destroyed all this work and left us in the lurch of depending on Southeast Asia for our rubber, a precarious situation to be sure. Throughout the book, the main backdrop is the Amazon. One of the reasons I had trouble putting the book down was because it transported me to that exotic place. Though I was doing my same old routine, I could jump into the narrative and feel like I was on an intrepid vacation never sure what the next bend in the river would bring: menacing or friendly natives, a new species of orchid, other wanderers, a potently hallucinogenic plant? For a thoughtful and engaging read one can do no better.
Rating:
Summary: Davis'portrayal of the Amazon is brilliant.
Review: One River was one of the best books I have read in quite some time. As a Ph.D student in Botany, I was inspired by the accounts of Shultes, Plowman and Davis' journeys to the Amazon seeking tropical plants and learning from the people who have been using them for generations.. Davis has a rare ability to mix technical science writing with a deep knowledge of history, culture, and politics and make it flow into a coherent narrative. Any student of ecology, evolution, (especially of plants) will love this book as will people with an interest in the cultures and history of the Amazon basin.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best in my bookshelf
Review: Quite simply one of my all time favorite books. I ALWAYS recommend it to people who wish to understand more about neotropical rainforests.
Rating:
Summary: A jewel of science documentary and travel writing
Review: This book is a beyond-detail-rich look at the enterprise of ethnobotany in an extraordinary region of threatened biological wealth, through a biography of one of the field's greatest figures. It is a planet of a book, a book to get lost in like the rainforest itself; I read it in deeper and deeper skims to take it in. I felt like Davis was giving me, not some facts about the Amazon, but a transferred chunk of the reality of the place itself. Curiously, I was advised that this would not be a good book to recommend to a family member who is very interested in biology and in indigenous cultures - because of all the objectionable hallucinogens in the book, which are typical of the region. (Once all the remnants of the peoples discussed have been converted to alcoholism, doubtless it will become permissible to know about them...) That would be one reason to support this book: it is a window out of our preconceptions, or at least out of the the ones that are uninformed or that don't know they need to *be* informed. This book is worth sitting down with, and worth passing on.
Rating:
Summary: Inspiring and beautiful
Review: This book should be a real eye opener for those who have never taken the time to open their minds to other ways of seeing issues such as those exposed in this book. For those who have, then this book will continue to inspire and delight. Besides all this, it is beautifully written, and anyone with imagination can be carried away and moved by the stories, the history, the science, and the sheer poetic content. This will make you realize, if you haven't already, that there are many different and amazing cultures, that there are so many rich experiences to have in our world, and how important it is to preserve and take care of the diversity our world offers.
Rating: 
Summary: Promising book keeps its silence: where's the botany?
Review: This book started out well but failed to achieve any cohesion and comes off finally as a collection of disparate essays organized loosely around the themes of ethnobotany, cocaine and the Amazon. It's probably a great read for people who are involved with all three of those topics, but if one is missing, the table doesn't stand up very well. American literary afficianados will find one small anecdote worth mentioning: William S. Burrough's trip through the rainforest. Kennedy haters will sympathize with the father figure who haunts the book, the father of modern ethnobotany itself and director of the ethnobotanical museum at Harvard college. Botanists might find themselves rather bored and the author for some reason seems singularly un-deft at using botanical nomenclature, which is his special area of study according to the book jacket. He's done some work on the zombie drugs of the Carribean. I was hoping maybe it reflected a stronger interest on his part in the ethno- part of ethnobotany, but then he falls down there too. He doesn't seem able to grasp that there are genetic affinities among languages just as there are between plants. Where it started to get interesting for me, where shamans teach their adepts in darkened caves in languages unknown, or perhaps no longer known, it's left tantalizingly unexplored. Where the author does use native terms, it's very hard to tell what his orthography is... Are these words to be pronounced as if they were Portugese? Spanish? English? Perhaps it's unfair to judge a book which only purports to be one man's reminiscences in such a harsh light, but I expected much more. If the book has wisdom to give, I can sum it up right here for the would-be reader: don't let a Peruvian border guard stick you with a dirty needle just because you're in a hurry to find more cocaine. Lastly, I felt it was strange to describe almost every tributary of the Amazon as a "drainage." Maybe it's correct technically, but it sounds clinical somehow. Why not the hip "watershed" or old-fashioned "tributary?" Wierd terminology comes up with regards canoes and weaving as well, so I'm left wondering, where's the botany? Geoffrey Vasiliauskas
Rating:
Summary: Fabulous Journey
Review: This is one of the best natural history and history of science an culture books I have ever read. I started this after reading another scintillating science book by David Quammen "Song of the Dodo" which I have since read again with great pleasure but "One River" forms a link between science and culture that was untouched in Quammen's tale of A.R. Wallace. The curious link is that Wallace started his journey's as a collector in the Amazon and covered some of the ground that Davis retraced. Davis does a marvelous job of melding his and Schultes adventures in interlocking chapters. The tale of the mission to secure a supply of rubber during the war and the subsequent loss of the incredible genetic library that Schultes founded and was subsequently destroyed by bureaucratic bumbling is classic and tragic. A wonderful read, highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Fabulous Journey
Review: This is one of the best natural history and history of science an culture books I have ever read. I started this after reading another scintillating science book by David Quammen "Song of the Dodo" which I have since read again with great pleasure but "One River" forms a link between science and culture that was untouched in Quammen's tale of A.R. Wallace. The curious link is that Wallace started his journey's as a collector in the Amazon and covered some of the ground that Davis retraced. Davis does a marvelous job of melding his and Schultes adventures in interlocking chapters. The tale of the mission to secure a supply of rubber during the war and the subsequent loss of the incredible genetic library that Schultes founded and was subsequently destroyed by bureaucratic bumbling is classic and tragic. A wonderful read, highly recommended.
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