One River : Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest

Richard Evans Schultes was arguably this century's foremost botanist. He was the father of ethnobotany, the study of indigenous peoples' knowledge and use of plants. He inadvertently inspired the 1960's drug culture with his scholarly writings on natural hallucinogens. When Japanese troops overran the world's rubber supply in Southeast Asia, Schultes, through his research on wild rubber trees in the Amazon, found himself central to the Allied war effort. Davis, one of Schultes's most devoted students, recounts the stories of his voyages along hundreds of miles of forested rivers, his near-fatal encounters with rapids and disease, his collaboration with Amazon shamans, and his dealings with people from the unsavoury to the sublime -- including a Nazi sympathiser, a heroically faithful native assistant, and the cult figures Timothy Leary and William Burroughs. [read more]

thanks to abuddhas memes