The Wild Trees, Richard Preston
The Wild Trees, Richard Preston
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

The Wild Trees
A Story of Passion and Daring

Author: Richard Preston

Narrator: Richard Preston

Abridged: 8 hr 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/10/2007

Categories: Nonfiction, Nature, Plants


Synopsis

Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain forest valleys in Northern California are the largest and tallest organisms the world has ever sustained -- the coast redwood trees, Sequoia sempervirens. The biggest redwoods are over a thousand years old, rising more than thirty-five stories in what's left of the once-vast ancient redwood forest. Believed to be impossible to ascend, these majestic giants have remained unexplored until recently Š when a tiny group of daring botanists and amateur naturalists discovered a lost, dangerous and hauntingly beautiful world high above California.

In The Wild Trees, Richard Preston unfolds the spellbinding story of these young voyagers who risk everything to explore the redwood canopy, where the massive trees form flying buttresses and cathedral-like structures in the air. They find a vertical Eden of hanging gardens and rare creatures, an untouched paradise where it's possible to stretch hammocks between tree branches and make love 300 feet in the air. But as they move through the treetops suspended on ropes, far out of sight of the ground, these young adventurers know that the smallest mistake can result in a plunge to one's death.

Preston mastered the techniques of tall-tree climbing to recount the discovery of this amazing world -- a grand adventure by turns terrifying, moving, and fascinating, from a master of nonfiction narrative.

About Richard Preston

Richard Preston has written nine books, including The Hot Zone, The Demon in the Freezer, and The Wild Trees. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages, and most of them have first appeared as articles in The New Yorker. Preston has won numerous awards, including the American Institute of Physics Award and the National Magazine Award. He’s also the only person not a medical doctor ever to receive the Centers for Disease Control’s Champion of Prevention Award for public health. An asteroid is named “Preston” after him. (Asteroid Preston is a ball of rock three miles in diameter, traveling on a wild orbit near Mars.) Richard Preston lives outside New York City with his wife, Michelle. They have three children.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Will on August 01, 2020

Preston looks at the very tallest trees on our planet and the people who seek them out, climb them and study them. This was a very engaging trip into a very unfamiliar territory. One amazing thing was that knowledge of the whereabouts of earth’s wooden giants is held by a very few individuals. The p......more

Goodreads review by Jessaka on June 18, 2019

Climbing Widow Makers When I was a child I loved climbing into our apricot and French plum trees. Climbing was fun, eating the fruit was better. My dog Rex would sit under the plum tree waiting for me to give him some fruit. Yes, a dog eating plums. But I grew out of the desire to climb trees after m......more

Goodreads review by Meghan on February 28, 2021

I found this book to be a bit... Incorrectly marketed. I am a lover of redwoods. I fell in love with my partner among them & have many fond memories attached to the trees around Trinity, CA specifically, so I thought this read would teach me a lot of new information about their biology. I also REALL......more

Goodreads review by M. on February 09, 2008

The book was good enough to get me to explore deeper into the dense Jedediah Smith Redwoods and find the Titans myself. Read the book early January, and found the Grove of Titans and Lost Monarch on January 15, 2008. See > M.D. Vaden's hunt for The Wild Trees Redwoods Unlike the book, I supplied one c......more

Goodreads review by Kerri Anne on August 18, 2015

This book. I adore this book. Mostly because I adore talking about, learning about, geeking out about trees. Any trees. But especially redwood trees. And this book is fantastic in its breadth and scope and coverage of the history of studying the redwoods, and all the stops and starts and madness the......more