Mythical and mystical account of Coastal Tall Redwoods

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	• The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring Richard Preston Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2008 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 72 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

On the Crowns of Giants

This book approaches the fate of Earth's disappearing giant forests from two angles - describing the poorly understood ecosystems in the canopies of giant tress, and covering the recreational and scientific climbers who have first explored these unknown realms. In a forest of redwoods, or other types of very tall trees, the uppermost branches weave together to form not just a shady canopy but also a complete off-the-ground ecosystem, and these unique natural wonders are under threat from logging and climate change and may disappear before they are even explored. A small clique of extreme tree climbers has mastered the art of climbing into these canopy ecosystems, assisted by enthusiasts searching systematically for the world's tallest unheralded trees, particularly in the shrinking redwood forests of Northern California and Oregon.

Preston includes a lot of fascinating coverage of these wondrous and previously unknown canopy ecosystems, which can only be reached via quite dangerous extreme climbing techniques. But the book is held back from greatness by Preston's attempts to add drama by diving in to the private lives of these groundbreaking (treebreaking?) climbers and enthusiasts. Excellent descriptions of natural discovery are constantly interrupted by detours into love lives and dubious personal biographies. I'm not sure why it matters that one of the young explorers was a knife salesman in college, and the personal travails of these folks are hardly unique just because they're now in a unique profession. Preston's attempted "nonfiction narrative" (in the words of the jacket blurb) is unfocused and makes a sizable portion of the book very tiresome. Fortunately, the rest of the book will resonate strongly with adventurous readers looking for the thrill of discovery, as there really are still worlds up there that have not been explored by humans. [~doomsdayer520~]

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Mythical and mystical account of Coastal Tall Redwoods

This is a fabulous account of the search for the tallest trees and the resulting studies of the canopy ecosystems. This may sound dry but it is so beautifully written that it is a book you cannot stop reading.

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Trees, glorious trees!

I bought this book on spec and I'm glad I did. Preston weaves the scientific and the personal into a compelling story of redwood canopy scientists exploring a then unknown world and what drove them to climb in the first place.
With many books of this sort it makes you feel somewhat ashamed to know that most of these huge redwood trees were cut down to make fences, floorboards etc. Hopefully books like 'The Wild Trees' will make us more appreciative of nature's wonder instead of looking at 'natural resources' as existing purely for man's benefit. If you're thinking of buying it, please do.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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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