The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring | 
| Author: Richard Preston
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  70 reviews
Sales Rank: 3914
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0812975596
Dewey Decimal Number: 585.5
EAN: 9780812975598
ASIN: 0812975596
Publication Date: February 12, 2008
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Product Description
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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| Customer Reviews: Read 65 more reviews...
 awful writing, editing May 7, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This should have been a fascinating book, but it's frustrating and laughable. A competent writing/editing team - combined with a photographer instead of a B&W illustrator - would have made all the difference. Skip it.
How to make a fascinating subject unreadable May 3, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
My book club read this book based upon a suggestion from someone who had heard about it but not read it. While the subject was fascinating, and the book began somewhat promisingly, by the time I reached the halfway mark I knew that I couldn't finish it. This so-called narrative non-fiction was nearly impossible to follow as Preston jumped from one unappealing person to the next without tying together an apparent story line. But, worst of all, the writing wasn't very good. Interestingly enough, the book club critique was unilaterally poor, and most members, like me, chose not to finish it. When one member mentioned that her 7th grader had read the book as part of the school curriculum, it made sense, because the writing style made the book more appropriate for Middle School readers than adults.
 Trees, glorious trees! April 29, 2008
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.
 A trip into another world and another time April 14, 2008
first written for the Kindle edition:
here is a small vanishing universe on this planet I'd never heard of before, forests that exist above forests, that use the tops of ancient redwoods as their platform. There are animals, birds, bugs, salamanders, even copepods -- most often found in oceans -- living there. There are lichens that pull nitrogen from the air to fertilize the ground. None of this grows in a new tree, all of this takes many of our lifetimes to develop. But many of our lifetimes are a mere whisk of the limbs for an ancient redwood.
This is a world that loggers were blithely destroying before a small band of explorers looked up and began to climb.
A trip into another world and another time April 14, 2008
There is a small vanishing universe on this planet I'd never heard of before, forests that exist above forests, that use the tops of ancient redwoods as their platform. There are animals, birds, bugs, salamanders, even copepods -- most often found in oceans -- living there. There are lichens that pull nitrogen from the air to fertilize the ground. None of this grows in a new tree, all of this takes many of our lifetimes to develop. But many of our lifetimes are a mere whisk of the limbs for an ancient redwood.
This is a world that loggers were blithely destroying before a small band of explorers looked up and began to climb.
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