Description (from the American publisher):
The western Amazon is the last frontier, the wildest west the Earth has ever known. For thirty years David G. Campbell has been exploring this lush wilderness, where more species live than have ever existed anywhere else at any time in the four-billion-year history of life on our planet.
In A Land of Ghosts: The Braided Lives of People and the Forest in Far Western Amazonia…Campbell takes us with him as he travels to the town of Cruzeiro do Sul, 2,800 miles from the mouth of the Amazon. Here he collects three old friends: Tarzan, a street urchin brought up in a bordello; Arito, a caiman hunter turned paleontologist; and Pimentel, a master canoe pilot. They travel together even farther into the rain forest, set up camp, and survey every living plant in a land so rich that an area of less than fifty acres contains three times as many tree species as all of North America.
Campbell knows the trees individually, has watched them grow from seedling
to death. He also knows the people of the Amazon: the recently arrived colonists
with their failing farms; the mixed-blood Caboclos, masters of hunting, fishing,
and survival; and the refugee Native Americans. Campbell introduces us to two
remarkable women, Dona Cabocla, a widow who raised six children on that lonely
frontier, and Dona Ausira, a Nokini Native American who is the last speaker
of her tribe's ages-old language. These people live in a land whose original
inhabitants were wiped out by centuries of disease, slavery, and genocide, taking
their traditions and languages with them — a land of ghosts.
Awards:
2005 Lannan Award
for Nonfiction
"Campbell’s prose is poetic, and his painterly eye makes you feel you were right there…[a] masterpiece of a book…" Peter de Groot, New Scientist
“…the Amazon] marvelously described and movingly evoked… Campbell offers what feels like a lover’s last, lingering look." William Grimes, The New York Times
“[Campbell] enchants us…[with] dramas that a less skilled observer wouldn't even know were unfolding." Elizabeth Royte, New York Times Book Review
"Like the sinuous Amazon River he writes of so eloquently, ecologist David Campbell glides between travelogue and natural history…" Roger Harris, American Scientist
"incredible clarity…one could read the book several times over and still grasp fresh connections." Greta Anderson, Des Moines Register
“Campbell is like an archangel moonlighting as a river guide." Jonathan Miles, Men's Journal
"It wouldn't be much of a compliment to say that he [Campbell] writes like a poet. Would that our poets could write as well as he does…" Eric Ormsby, NY Sun
"…[a] fluent and highly intelligent book…" Joe Kane, Orion
“…a vibrant book, one that truly captures the wonder of the Amazon
rainforest and the decay of its remote frontier settlements.” John Hemming,
Times Higher Education Supplement (UK)