Shadows in the Sun: Travels to Landscapes of Spirit and Desire - Softcover

Davis, Wade

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0767904028 ISBN 13: 9780767904025

Publisher: Broadway Books, 1999

Synopsis

The author of The Serpent and the Rainbow offers a collection of essays and stories about the relationship between humans and the natural world. Reprint.

About this title

Review:

The wonders of the diversity of various cultures and their relationship to their landscape - from the high Arctic and the northern forests to the swamps of the Orinoco - are hunted, gathered, and honestly appreciated here by the peripatetic Davis (One River, 1996). Davis is a sojourner in remote places. He tarries, hoping to get a taste of the intimate, deep reverence for the home place that indigenous people experience by staying put, to sample some of the mythopoetic associations and enigmatic happenings that spring like girls from the land for those who sit still long enough to witness. Here he recounts a dozen journeys, some in search of ethnobotanicals, some to expose himself to the poetics of a particular patch of ground, others to get a psychic education, as when he accompanies the Haitian Vodouns in their pilgrimage to sacred places, both terrestrial and ethereal. There is a good profile of Bruno Manser, a Swiss who went to live among Sarawak's Penan and joined them in their fight against the pillagers (many of them governmental) of their forest, thus becoming "a fugitive straddling the cusp of cultures." That same place, the shear zone, is inhabited by hamans, and Davis has been disturbed and fascinated in many of his travels by these men and women operating outside our familiar calculus of explanation. And as an ethnobotanist, he is drawn to the human potential unleashed by profoundly altered states - firewalking, slowing heartbeats to near imperceptible levels - and the psychotropics that serve as launch pads. One such hallucinogen comes from a monstrous toad that secretes a drug from glands on its head; it seems very handy for a quick slurp, but it turns out that you have to toke the toad to get the best buzz. Davis's lovely, cubist, rich landscape portraits are also topographies of the spirit, conveying a sense of place, but perhaps even more, the music of place. (Kirkus Reviews)

About the Author:

Wade Davis is a scientist, anthropologist, and writer who received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany from Harvard University and has spent twenty-five years studying the plants, psychotropic drugs, and ceremonial rituals of indigenous cultures around the world. He is the author of the international bestseller The Serpent and the Rainbow, which was later released as a feature motion picture, as well as six other books including One River. Davis's writing has appeared in Outside, National Geographic, Fortune, and Condé Nast Traveler.

About this edition

• Publisher: Broadway Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0767904028
• ISBN 13: 9780767904025
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 292
• Editor: Marino Lauren