One River

Wade Davis

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781439126837
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

The story of two generations of scientific explorers in South America—Richard Evans Schultes and his protégé Wade Davis—an epic tale of adventure and a compelling work of natural history.

In 1941, Professor Richard Evan Schultes took a leave from Harvard and disappeared into the Amazon, where he spent the next twelve years mapping uncharted rivers and living among dozens of Indian tribes. In the 1970s, he sent two prize students, Tim Plowman and Wade Davis, to follow in his footsteps and unveil the botanical secrets of coca, the notorious source of cocaine, a sacred plant known to the Inca as the Divine Leaf of Immortality.

A stunning account of adventure and discovery, betrayal and destruction, One River is a story of two generations of explorers drawn together by the transcendent knowledge of Indian peoples, the visionary realms of the shaman, and the extraordinary plants that sustain all life in a forest that once stood immense and inviolable.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• CHAPTER ONE Juan’s Farewell
• CHAPTER TWO Mountains of the Elder Brother
• CHAPTER THREE The Peyote Road 1936
• CHAPTER FOUR Flesh of the Gods 1938 39
• CHAPTER FIVE The Red Hotel
• CHAPTER SIX The Jaguar’s Nectar
• CHAPTER SEVEN The Sky Is Green and the Forest Blue 1941 42
• CHAPTER EIGHT The Sad Lowlands
• CHAPTER NINE Among the Waorani
• CHAPTER TEN White Blood of the Forest 1943
• CHAPTER ELEVEN The Betrayal of the Dream 1944 54
• CHAPTER TWELVE The Blue Orchid 1947 48
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Divine Leaf of Immortality
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN One River
• Notes on Sources
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR