One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest
Leonardo January 1, 1998 George Gessert, W. J. Davis 198 citations
In the early 1940s, Richard Evans Schultes, a Harvard botanist, disappeared into the Northwest Amazon of Colombia for twelve years, mapping uncharted rivers, living among two dozen Indian tribes, and collecting some twenty thousand botanical specimens—three hundred of them new to science. He documented shamans' knowledge of medicinal and hallucinogenic plants, including ololiuqui and teonanacatl. Decades later, in 1974-75, his students Wade Davis and Tim Plowman traveled the length of South America, living among a dozen tribes to collect medicinal plants and trace coca's origins. The account contrasts the once-vast, inviolable rainforest with the dramatically changed world of their journey and today.